In the great link shortening battle, it looks like bit.ly is going to come out on top following the collapse of one of their major competitors tr.im. There was nothing wrong with the service tr.im provided, it was actually an excellent product with great brand name and a decent and loyal user base. So what went wrong?
There’s just no way to monetize URL shortening. According to compete.com, they had 800,000 users a month but somehow couldn’t turn that traffic into money. So with tr.im falling by the wayside, that paves the way for their main competitor to run away with the lions share of the URL shortening market. In May, bit.ly became the default URL shorterner at twitter.com, something which seriously boosted their traffic. They’re now getting upwards of 4m unique hits a month, but the question ‘can we make any money doing this?’ which was answered with a resounding “no” by tr.im’s owners Nambu has yet to be properly answered by bit.ly.
If tr.im can’t monetize a userbase of 800,000 people, can bit.ly monetize a user base of 4 million? What would the proposed business plan be? Some have speculated that bit.ly will mine their link data to make a digg style website, but they could run into a problem. On the blog post about tr.im’s untimely closure they described the problem link data:
And, the data that tr.im generates — the hottest links that people are sharing right now — is all well and good, but everyone has this data. tr.im gets hit by countless bots every day farming this data to create and operate websites such as tweetmeme.com. So, *everyone* has this data, meaning it is basically worthless
If bit.ly plan on making a news website running off this data, how will they be any different than sites like tweetmeme? Their data, like tr.im’s, can be mined by bots, so how will bit.ly stand out from the rabble? One thing is clear, turning monthly traffic into a monthly profit seems more difficult than you’d have thought…
If twitter step in and purchase bit.ly outright then they could at least make a decent profit on the work they’ve done. Aside from that, can anyone see a way for bit.ly to make some dollars?
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