This weekend tr.im, very popular URL shortening service, decided it was time to shut down their service. This news comes as competing service Bit.ly is getting a lot of attention.
I believe that it is quite obvious that the business of shortening URLs does not come from the act of shortening, but from other services offered in conjunction with this feature. Bit.ly’s statistics on clicks are an incentive to use it, and even more indepth insight into clicks and other analytics data would be considered worth paying for to many marketers and publications spreading links to their content.
These URL shorteners pass a lot of traffic through their links, traffic that can be analyzed and turned into valuable data, data valuable enough to provide insight into what is popular on the web in near real-time. There are many rumours of Bit.ly planning to launch a news service featuring popular links to compete with the likes of Digg and Reddit.
URL shortening is a feature, not a business. It is what the company does with their URL shortening that will make it a business. Tr.im decided their battle against Bit.ly was too uphill, even though they had a significant userbase and a more logical domain name. They seem to think the aforementioned uses of the data are not enough to base a business on. So how will Bit.ly pull it off?
Bit.ly has deep pocketed backers that will fund the company while they attempt to find what works. I think they should attempt to use their data and service in as many ways as possible, and see what catches on. After following their Bit.ly Now Twitter account, I believe their data is useful enough to base a “popular news” service on. Will people pay for “pro” analytics features on their URLs? I bet they would, so why not try offering it.
This is my second post about URL shorteners, and more specifically, Bit.ly. Check out my first post on the topic: Bit.ly is going to be big. Stay tuned for more thoughts on this “business.”
