Tr.im Resurrected
blog.tr.im
blog.tr.im
So, what's the problem then ? Seems like your cost just went down, you should be happy about it, not complain.
If you can't make money at traffic level X because the model you are pursuing is broken then at level N*X you are in much worse shape. And yet, they seem to want to be in much worse shape...
Direct costs may go down, since they have less URLs to worry about. But value goes down as well, since they have less data to mine. There may be some critical mass of data required to have anything of value.
I don't buy it.
A url shortener is relatively trivial to operate (at least, compared to some of the stuff I'm doing right now). It works, or it doesn't, once you've got it there isn't much you can do to make it better or add features.
So development costs are almost a one-time affair and it seems they had already done that.
What's left is the bandwidth cost.
A Mbit is about $5 /month in bulk. The average 'GET' reguest from a device is maybe 500 bytes, the answer, the redirect is maybe another 500 bytes. So say 1 Kbyte in total (generous!). 1Mbit / sec = 128 Kbyte, so that is roughly 100 requests / second for $5 /month. Serverload is trivial, a single table with a unique key, you can do 1000's of queries like that per second on a single box. It is a trivially parallel problem, simply distribute all urls across all machines. A single box could push maybe 100K requests / second using varnishd or some other front end cache (tr.im uses nginx), so that's maybe 800Kbit/sec out of one box.
You'll need a bunch of IPs otherwise you'll run out of sockets and you'll need some memory for the cache.
Calculate in some margin and you can cut that down to maybe 500 Mbit/sec, so that box would cost you $2500 / month and it would handle a staggering 62500*86400 = 5 billion requests / day.
No way tr.im is at that level, more likely a few tens of millions of requests per day, reduce bandwidth costs accordingly, say $500 to $1000.
It wouldn't take more than a bunch of google ads displayed to the makers of the urls or a donation to keep a service like that going, that's not a whole lot of $ to make on a site. One of my sites which converts absolutely horrible does that kind of money on 27000 visitors / day (mostly from Finland, don't ask...).
This will never be a business, and personally I really don't understand why the likes of twitter do not give a short url out on their own service. But it also does not cost a fortune to run, that's bs.
And if you want to create 'value' you should do something a little more sticky than a url shortener, it literally is a throwaway relationship with your audience.
And if you lock them out for a couple of days because you can't make up your mind if you're going to sink or swim you have really tossed your investment into the water.
Secondly, if they have no business model, and they do not have any connections, they dont seem to have any options!
In fact, laws were passed to stop the practice of having a "going out of business sale" when the business was not failing because it was once a common advertising strategy. In some states, you even have to register such sales with the Attorney General
Also, Apple and At&t rejecting apps that clearly are rejected because the app is their competition(Skype for one).
This is all new territory and these companies might be the impetus for much needed precedence!
I can't quite put my finger on why I come down on Twitter being able to prefer bit.ly if they want and Apple not being able to 'prefer' at&t...
Something doesn't jive here.
Considering that they did intend to keep the old URLs functioning, and that users can get the same free service from dozens of URL shorteners, the whole thing just seems weird.
They're one of many competitors in an eco-system that's relatively easy to enter, other competitors have a significant advantage over them, and I have no idea what their business model is. When they said they no longer wanted to sink money into their project, I understood why.
I also understand that people often feel entitled to free services, would complain when one goes away, and they might not have been prepared for that kind of social pressure. I understand giving in to it.
It seems like this was a ploy to get people's attention for tr.im so they could try to sell it.
Please.
Why exactly should anyone have any trust in such a statement from people who shut down their service with little or no advance warning, but could bring it back up "indefinitely" after some "appeals"?
Still, I remain skeptical; this company hasn't earned much trust from me.
It's not like they suddenly announced "we're pulling the plug, screw you all." It seemed like a considered decision, made from a position where they could afford to wind down the service over 6 months.
I think their decision to not shut down may be frankly irresponsible. Their reasons for closing seemed fair: bit.ly has a monopoly on URL-shortening due to Twitter; there's really not a market for more than one or two URL-shortening services; there's no clear way to monetize URL-shortening unless you're the dominant player (and can sell stats); any sale to a third party risked turning the service into something evil that they had ethical problems with; keeping the service open would just burn money and effort better spent on other things. All, to my mind, valid reasons for closing.
Deciding to reopen (or not close) because a bunch of people complained -- people who aren't going to solve any of those fundamental issues -- that seems like the questionable decision.
They were doing the right thing, but seemingly got talked out of it. It doesn't make sense.
2) It is a questionable decision that doesn't make much sense. One of the few scenarios that seems remotely sensible is that this was an attempt to attract attention, particularly from investors who might be interested in a service with such an enthusiastic following that they'd "appeal" to the company to keep it going.
3) If not investors, then buyers: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/10/trim-cuts-off-bitlys-30...
How much money is Google making from selling all the stats that they gathered on people's behaviors, cicks, etc.?
The problem with URL shorteners is that there is no space to put ads.
Otherwise they are the new Microsoft. ;)
Done, the URL shortening destroying the internet problem is solved. We've had URL shorteners forever, they've only become an issue because of Twitter. Twitter should just do away with it all.
The only solution would be for Twitter to acquire Bitly and their complex code base, how else are the inflated prices going to be justified ?
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/30/if-bitly-is-worth-8-mil...
But really something like this is probably best rolled into the services that require them, like Twitter. Twitter should provide it, I think.
I think bit.ly are the only ones that have a chance of making real money. Their model is:
1. Build a very good URL shortening service
2. Have a close relationship with Twitter, get them to choose you as their URL shortener
3. Hope Twitter will get bought and then buy you, like they bought Summize for search.
The funny thing about bit.ly is that they take this model to the next level - they are actually building to be bought by a specific company which has yet to make any income itself.
On the other hand, bit.ly's investors have a lot of pull in Twitter, so it's a unique situation. I don't know enough about VC investments to tell, but the situation where investors in X create Y in order for it to be bought by X - obviously with some profit - is pretty interesting.
Makes me feel skeezy just thinking about it.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/04/its-awesm-create-a-powe...
For statistics, we provide info down to the IP address and user agent that clicked on the link.
The people who sign up for personalized domains can use whatever domain they want and we'll help them track down a good tiny one if they need.
Congratulations though... I'm sure you'll see a lot of followers.
Interestingly, I guess, this did make me stop and think about whether I wanted links to my company and products to disappear when these shortener services finally all come crashing down. Which is why I decided I needed to control it myself.
I'd already bought a pretty short name a couple of years ago with the intention of putting up a mobile version of our site on it.
When a person submits a URL to the shortener, they analyze the URL to figure out what the content is about.
Then when somebody clicks on the shortened link, part of the redirect process is to implant a behavioral AdNetwork's cookie with the proper tags, based on the content that's already been analyzed.
You can then monetize the core service without interrupting the redirect flow.
But what if we had our own url shorteners? I could have my own shortener on my own domain (twitter won't re-shorten it), so there wouldn't be any privacity or volatility issues.
Anyway, we're still "lazy" people... so we have to live with it.