What is business model of URL shortening services like bit.ly and tinurl?

How do URL shortening services earn ? Do they get funded o开发者_C百科ver a period of time and then, come out with algorithms to then dish out category specific trending hot URL's or something ? Any insight into this ?

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The value of a URL shortener is the statistics behind it. If you have a niche or significant volume for a general shortening service, you can find out what domains are popular or possibly targets if you analyzed the content of popular sites. You can then use this to target your ads on various networks or perhaps you can find a marketing firm who would be interested in the data.

The other way you make money off URL shortening is branding. This works if you want to establish yourself as an authority in a niche; this is especially useful on social networks. Even if you don't link to sites on your own network, you can look at your shortener stats and see if the content you are posting is being reached by your fans. You can find out which links on social networks, different facebook pages, different times of the day on twitter, give you the most return. Also, if you purchase a short domain or have a short domain you can reinforce your brand when people retweet your message. People might not click on every link on Twitter or Facebook, but the more often they see your brand, the more likely they are to remember it in the future.

In the year 2011+ most of the social networks and posting services have their own de facto shorteners, so you likely would not be able to compete without a lot of money being put in, and you would need to spend a lot of time making the marketing connections and finding buyers for your data. I don't think you can make too much money starting up, but the internal statistics you can gain from using your own shortener might help with branding and intelligence/planning, which is harder to quantify in later dollar gains. The social networking insights are were I get most of the value with my URL shortener.