14 DAY TRIAL // Bit.ly's biggest asset at the moment is the amount of data it's been collecting, especially for the past months since the service took off. It's been using it to provide publishers with analytics for a while now and has recently introduced a premium service with even more stats Bit.ly Pro. Now, it's putting all that data to good use again by launching an experimental product, Bitly.tv, which uses it to determine the most popular videos of the moment.
“Bit.ly TV is like the internet itself. There are parts of it that are terribly serious and important — like the footage of students battling the basiji on the streets of Tehran — alongside other bits, like the upside-down French bulldog puppy and the Ukelele kid, meant to surprise and delight,” Bit.ly writes.
Bit.ly has managed to become the biggest URL shortening service out there, in no small part because it was selected as the default service by Twitter. It pretty much dominates the market at this point, a great thing in itself, but there isn't any money to be made from shortening links for free, at least not directly. So, it has to get creative in order to generate revenue and utilize its biggest asset, the sheer amount of link data that passes through each day.
It's not going to make any money with the video rankings, but the move hints at the wider possibilities available to Bit.ly. It's not that hard to imagine the company launching a full-blown news aggregator that would put Digg to shame in terms of speed and responsiveness. In fact, the company says so itself, Bitly.tv is just a first step designed to test the feasibility of the idea.
That isn't to say that it's not a pretty interesting product in itself. It uses Bit.ly's bitrank algorithm to determine the most popular videos at any given time, but also which are the fastest rising. The site lists the hottest videos of the moment or the most popular of the last day or two days. What's more, the videos can be viewed inline at the site in a pop-up overlay featuring a live stream of the tweets linking to it. It's the second product to come out of the Bit.ly Labs, after J.mp, and it's likely not going to be the last.
