Tag Archives: Bit.ly
Bit.ly Receiving Over One Billion Clicks Per Month
URL shortening service Bit.ly gained a lot of ground when TweetDeck, a desktop application built on Adobe AIR for making Twitter easier, made the service a default. Twitter has roughly 20 million users that are actively clicking on short Bit.ly URLs which redirects them to interesting content.
Like Twitter, the problem with Bit.ly is that the service did not have any sort of revenue model. However Bit.ly raised $2 million in VC funding from Betaworks, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, Social Leverage, SoftTech VC, and Ron Conway. Today Bit.ly General Manager Andrew Cohen revealed an idea to how they plan to make money in an interview with Wired.
Cohen said that Bit.ly is planning to take the shortened links and creating a real-time news service that will work in a similar format as Twitter trends. The news service would feature the most clicked links.
“We’re seeing more than a billion clicks in the course of a month,” stated Cohen. “Looking at that volume of data, we can see the most interesting and the most important content that is being shared across the whole of the real-time web.”
Twitter is rumored to be considering an outright acquisition of Bit.ly. I would be surprised if Twitter considers actually buying out Bit.ly when it is not difficult to create a URL shortening service yourself.
[via Wired]
Categories Andrew Cohen, Bit.ly
Leave a comment
Bit.ly Is Now The Biggest URL Shortening Service
Thanks to Twitter switching their default URL shortening service from TinyURL, Bit.ly is now the shortest URL service online today. Bit.ly currently has a 46.71% market share and TinyURL now has a 42.29%. About one month ago, TinyURL had a 75% market share and Bit.ly had only about 13%.
Ever since the growth in Twitter’s popularity, URL shortening services have been growing. Some companies have made shorter URLs around their services like TechCrunch and Digg. Some other examples of URL shortening services include Is.gd, ff.im, cli.gs, and ow.ly.
In late March, Bit.ly had raised around $2 million and spun out of incubator firm Betaworks. The above pie chart is created by Tweetmeme. They update the chart every 24 hours.
Categories Bit.ly, TinyURL
Leave a comment
URL Shortening Service Bit.ly Raises $2 Million
Bit.ly has been growing rapidly with the help of Twitter. People are constantly using Bit.ly to shorten URLs of stories, images, and videos that people want to share with their Twitter followers. Bit.ly was created under Betaworks, an incubation firm that helped sell Summize to Twitter last year. Betaworks has taken Bit.ly and is spinning it out as a separate, well-funded company.
O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and several other investors plugged $2 million into the URL shortening service. Other investors include Social Leverage, SoftTech VC, and Ron Conway. Bryce Roberts of O’Reilly will join the Board of Directors at Bit.ly.
Just last week alone, about 20 million URLs have been shortened using Bit.ly. That number is increasing by 10% every week. The only source of revenue Bit.ly has is Google Ads that are scattered around their homepage. This is a similar approach to their biggest competitor TinyURL.com. TinyURL depends mainly on donations and Google Ads too.
[via MediaMemo]