14 DAY TRIAL // URL shorteners were a very hot trend last year with the explosion of Twitter, but, like any other hype-driven movement, it died off eventually. Still, that’s not to say there’s no money to be made from these services, just not enough to sustain hundreds of competitors. Bit.ly is one of the few success stories. After becoming the ‘de facto’ URL shortener on Twitter, the service has only gone up in usage. With the introduction of Bit.ly Pro, the premium service, the company is finally making some money as well. Not only that, it’s growing at a never-before-seen pace.
“Thousands of brands and bloggers are now up and running on the service. Yahoo, MySpace, The Huffington Post, Politico, Pepsi, NPR, Scribd, Toys’R’Us, CSPAN, Dailymotion, IMDB, the New York Times, Bravo, Mozilla and Amazon are just a few of the great brands that have joined in the last few months. Search for yahoo.it, 4sq.com, huff.to, dai.ly, toysr.us, n.pr, scri.bi, politi.co, amzn.to, or bravo.ly and you’ll see thousands of impressions happening in real time,” an entry on the Bit.ly blog reads.
No doubt, the service has been a hit with publishers or companies managing an online presence. But how does this success translate into actual numbers? Luckily, Bit.ly is providing those too. The company says that in the six months or so since the Pro service was launched, 12,500 companies and individuals have signed up.
All of these websites combined reach an audience of 1.7 billion ‘unique’ visitors. Of course, in this case, ‘unique’ relates to each individual site, there is significant overlap between the users of any of the websites and services that are using Bit.ly Pro. In total, Bit.ly now processes 4.7 billion clicks every month, though it’s unclear if this number includes the Pro customers as well. Still, the number is up from 3.4 billion clicks in April and 2.7 billion in February.
In any case, this activity has propelled Bit.ly to the 76th place in Google DoubleClick’s top 1,000 websites. Along with the ‘progress report,’ Bit.ly is also announcing a new partnership with web analytics company Webtrends which will start incorporating Bit.ly data into its products.