14 DAY TRIAL // Bit.ly is starting to take advantage of its position of market leader in URL shortening services. The company has been consolidating its position and has been adding new analytics tools and other features, but may finally start earning some real money now that its paid Bit.ly Pro service has been made available to anyone in an open beta program.
"Since we announced the bit.ly Pro service last month, we’ve been racing to keep up with the demand — thousands of companies and bloggers have already signed up, and we are getting new requests every day. To help everyone get up and running as soon as possible, we’ve decided to move to an open beta: we’re going to launch a self-service website next week. Publishers will be able to log in there and set up their accounts in a matter of minutes," Bit.ly announced almost two weeks ago.
It took it a little more than anticipated, but the self-serving custom URL shortening platform is now live and open to anyone for registration. All you need is a registered domain name, preferably a short one, otherwise you're kind of defeating the purpose, and a Bit.ly account. After this, you can go in two directions.
If you're a regular user, you'll probably want to sign up for the free Bit.ly Pro version which gets you most of the benefits of the service. You get the Bit.ly dashboard to keep an eye on how your short links are spreading and the Bit.ly Twitter and Facebook button to embed on your site. Obviously, you get the whitelabel shortening service, but with a 10,000 requests per day limit, which should be enough for most people.
If you need more than that though, you'll need to pay up, Bit.ly doesn't say how much yet as the program is still in beta. With the subscription service, you get to have multiple short URLs with more complete analytics dashboards for all of them. They also get their brand name, aka short URL, used whenever anyone uses Bit.ly to link to their content. "[W]hen you shorten or share an article from theonion.com (for example), it will resolve to an onion.com short URL instead of a bit.ly-branded URL," Bit.ly explains. The Bit.ly Pro service is now open to everyone.