March 31, 2009 at 14:34Bit.ly Gets $ 2 Million Link Reduction Is A Profitable Business?
In a world that is limited to 140 characters, brevity is worth its weight in gold. This is why link shortening services are rapidly gaining popularity. One of them, Bit.ly , received venture financing in the amount of $ 2 million yesterday for 20% of the project, which means a total project estimate of $ 8 million.
It should be noted that Bit.ly is the second most popular link shortening service on the Internet. He controls about 13% of the market, significantly inferior to the absolute leader TinyURL (75%), according to Tweetmeme statistics .
That is, if you extrapolate the Bit.ly estimate to TinyURL, then it can be estimated at $ 50 million at all. True, this is not entirely correct, because the popularity of TinyURL.com froze in place, while Bit.ly takes off like a rocket. The reasons are clear: 6 characters instead of 11, statistics and analytics tools, the lack of contextual advertising, as well as the corporate mafia - Bit.ly and Twitter have the same investors . But even if you take an estimate of several tens of millions - is it really possible for a link reduction service to bring such a profit? Due to what? No one can explain this yet.
Perhaps investors are thinking about the future. Controlling someone else’s links, these services actually control someone else’s traffic and theoretically can do anything with it, converting it into banner displays and showing contextual advertising. How real this really is is also unclear.
Over the past week, Bit.ly has processed 20 million clicks, and this number is growing at 10% per week.
via TechCrunch
It should be noted that Bit.ly is the second most popular link shortening service on the Internet. He controls about 13% of the market, significantly inferior to the absolute leader TinyURL (75%), according to Tweetmeme statistics .
That is, if you extrapolate the Bit.ly estimate to TinyURL, then it can be estimated at $ 50 million at all. True, this is not entirely correct, because the popularity of TinyURL.com froze in place, while Bit.ly takes off like a rocket. The reasons are clear: 6 characters instead of 11, statistics and analytics tools, the lack of contextual advertising, as well as the corporate mafia - Bit.ly and Twitter have the same investors . But even if you take an estimate of several tens of millions - is it really possible for a link reduction service to bring such a profit? Due to what? No one can explain this yet.
Perhaps investors are thinking about the future. Controlling someone else’s links, these services actually control someone else’s traffic and theoretically can do anything with it, converting it into banner displays and showing contextual advertising. How real this really is is also unclear.
Over the past week, Bit.ly has processed 20 million clicks, and this number is growing at 10% per week.
via TechCrunch