14 DAY TRIAL // URL shorteners are the latest craze and there seems to be no stopping the wave of new companies and individuals trying to take a piece of the market. But, while there's no shortage of shorteners, none of them is actually making any money. In true startup philosophy, everyone wants to get the user numbers first and worry about the money later. Well, Bit.ly, by far the most popular service, has the users, now it's time to worry about the finances.
In an interview with Wired, Bit.ly General Manager Andrew Cohen put forward some ideas and plans for the fledgling company to generate revenue. Advertising was denied flat out, in true Twitter style, with Cohen saying he wasn't considering the option even for a small subset of links.
What he is considering, though, is harnessing the power of the billions of clicks the site sees monthly to create a news service based on the most popular links. The system would work similarly to Twitter's trending topics, but would make use of the shared links rather than the popular subjects. The new service created would, in a way, compete with Digg, but it would be much faster to react and, in some way, more objective, as it won't involve any user intervention. This idea has been proposed already by others and is considered to be the most viable, so it's no wonder the CEO is seriously considering it.
The other opportunity for the URL shortener would be providing important statistical data to those interested. Advertisers and marketers would pay good money to have real-time access to a large volume of data and brands would also greatly appreciate being able to keep an eye on how their products and content is spreading. The service already provides statistical data to every link shared through it, so more information on a link or on larger data sets would be a next logical step.