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How Do URL Shorteners Make Money?
Have you ever wondered how URL shortening websites like TinyURL, bit.ly and is.gd make money? Me too.
There’s an enlightening conversation taking place on Hacker News about just that subject. The short is, they don’t make any money.
They don’t. To be honest the majority of url shorteners don’t make any money at all. I know because I run one.
It costs me nothing to run because it uses next to no resources on a server that I already pay for and I got the domain for free.
The long answer is that they don’t, but that they don’t cost much to run and hopefully, someone, someday will think of a way to make money with them. The HN discussion seems to be centered on one unproven method of profiting: market research.
# Correct, bit.ly knows all the most popular links on Twitter in real time. This is worth a ton, or at least it could be.
and
# Think: pulling that data into a techmeme.com style aggregator/ranking site for the most popular urls people are linking to. Imagine how dynamic it would be – things that got linked to the most would percolate up to the top. you could watch in near real time as news breaks and gains traction.
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Matt | Small Biz Bee on March 9th, 2009 8:54 pm
This is something I’ve often wondered about…thanks for shedding some light on it, guess I’m not missing out on some big money making machine!
Matt
Rich on March 11th, 2009 3:01 am
Well yes, and I am surprised what will these Twitter users do without them, huh?!
Maybe there’s a way, as they may leave us otherwise.
Thanks for sharing though.
Jaclyn on March 11th, 2009 11:35 am
That is very interesting, i too myself have sat back and wondered how they made any money if any at all.
Bob Davies on July 7th, 2010 1:24 pm
It’s not impossible for URL shorteners to make money.
http://picz.us does it by earning affiliate revenue from stock photography sites and amazon. You set your codes on your account the site builds the affiliate link and shortens it. A bar is also added to give more links to earn from when the link is to any other (non-affiliated site).
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