Bit.ly Announces Its First CEO

Bit.ly, the prominent URL-shrinking site, has announced that it's gotten a new CEO, Peter Stern, a known web entrepreneur. The service has gotten its first CEO, in fact, since there was no one at the company filling in the position full time until now.

Started as a project of Betaworks, Bit.ly has evolved to the point where it needs full time leadership. The fact that the company has hired a CEO at this point also indicates that there are no immediate selling plans.

"bitly was started @betaworks almost three years ago, and in that time it has grown from a project into a business," Bit.ly announced on its blog.

"The site is a big site, the API is one of the largest on the web, there are thousands of white label partners using bitly, billions of links created, and billions of clicks on those links every month," the announcement boasted.

"About 8 weeks ago we announced the arrival of MRoth from Flickr, now we are announcing Peter Stern’s arrival as CEO. As bitly is entering a new stage in its development I could not be more excited to pass the baton to Peter," John Borthwick, CEO of Betaworks who has been overseeing Bit.ly as well, wrote.

It's interesting that Bit.ly, which has become one of the biggest if not the biggest service associated with Twitter, despite the fact that it can be used for countless other things and in other contexts, hasn't had anyone to lead it so far.

It debuted whitelabel services quite some time ago and it is used by millions of people. But it hasn't managed to generate much revenue. It's sitting on a treasure trove of data, from all of the links it shortens and the analytics it gathered for each of them, but it hasn't managed to convert that into money just yet.