
Bit.ly Raises $10 Million Series B, Still Growing Like Crazy - aditya
http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/07/bit-ly-10-million/
======
wave
I run un-shortening service called <http://unshort.me> which is getting about
200K API requests/day.

    
    
      Sample of 1,000,000 requests from the service:
    
      bit.ly       612,170
      tinyurl.com   55,091
      goo.gl        41,812
      ow.ly         35,531
      is.gd         29,533 
      t.co          26,043
      j.mp          21,172
      other        178,648

~~~
michaelbuckbee
The service in there that surprised me was Google's. While the chrome
shortener extension has been out for a while it wasn't officially announced
until last week.

Given that the big value add (beyond white labeling) that is being provided by
these services is analytics tracking I'd be deeply concerned about a new URL
shortener run by the same company with the dominant web analytics package.

It's only a matter of time until goo.gl stats are displayed within Google
analytics and when that hits I wonder how many will stay with the current
shortener services.

------
krelian
I would have only taken 1 million to tell them it's a bad investment. This
whole URL shortening business is so pathetic. OK, so twitter decided to be SMS
compatible and limit messages to 140 characters, so what? It's an arbitrary
limit attached to a standard that has already reached it's peak and can only
go down from here. With 3G and smartphones becoming ubiquitous less and less
people are going to be using sms for their messaging and the need to limit
messages to 140 characters will diminish. It's a waining market not a startup
opportunity.

~~~
rokhayakebe
It's the data that is valuable, what people are interested in.

------
nir
Ask HN: How does growing # of URLs convert to growing business? I have a small
app that does the opposite of bit.ly (converts shortened URL to the original
ones, adding some info like page title etc). It's also "growing like crazy" -
no big deal considering that millions of new URLs are created every day - but
it just means more hosting costs for me. Any ideas on how to convert this to
revenue instead?

(The site is on <http://therealurl.appspot.com/> )

~~~
mootothemax
The article gives a couple of clues about how bit.ly makes money:

 _Its first source of revenues comes from Bit.ly Pro accounts, which are used
by 3,000 companies and another individual 1,000 power users._

and

 _The bigger opportunity for bit.ly is in all the data it is harvesting about
which links people are sharing in realtime... If you think about it, bit.ly
knows what news is breaking because everybody is sharing it._

Interesting to think about moneytising the links in this way :-)

~~~
pchristensen
Not to rain on their parade, but wasn't data mining supposed to make FoxMarks
valuable too?

~~~
photon_off
My sentiments.

I think that anybody who says "URL popularity data mining is valuable" is just
repeating what somebody else said. There are probably 100 services right now
that could tell you the hottest 1,000 URLs. Delicious, Google/Yahoo Buzz, any
of the dozens of popular bookmarking and social media sites, AddThis.com and
their ilk, Quantcast and their ilk, Twitter, any URL shortening service, your
ISP, etc. URLs have been currency for a long time now.

I hear about this information being valuable all the time, yet I've never once
read about any of these companies profiting from knowing the popularity of
URLs. I might just be ignorant, so please HN, tell me who is paying for a list
of popular URLs?

------
shaggy
I really don't understand how shortening URLs is a viable business model? $10
million dollars is an enourmous sum of money to invest for something that
provides almost no substantive value. That money would be better invested in
software that allows (forces would be better) to design sane and usable URI
schemes.

~~~
shin_lao
I agree.

We built one as a proof-of-concept around our post-modern database engine. It
costs orders of magnitude less than $ 10,000,000. I don't understand why they
need that much money.

We could probably monetize it (advertisement on the main page) to the point of
not having it costs us money to run it, but since it's more a promotional
platform than a business...

(if you're curious: <http://wrp.me/>).

------
edash
This is great PR. I'd be willing to bet this fundraising announcement was
fast-tracked to counter the whole ".ly is unsafe" story from the past few
days.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1763431>

------
iamjustlooking
How do you even begin to make a return on this money? Put redirects in a frame
and put an ad in? Charge for some sort of premium service and hope people
don't go to one of many other url shortening services?

~~~
msbarnett
Presumably they're hoping to monetize the data they're harvesting, with things
like the mentioned social news site.

How realistic it is that that will be a home run for them, I'm not sure.

~~~
prawn
Plus white-labelled services.

~~~
msbarnett
I wonder how much money there is in that. For organizations that want a vanity
shortener but have no in-house IT resources it might have some appeal, but it
seems like it would be a very cheap, simple thing to do in house in all other
cases.

~~~
prawn
I have a rudimentary shortener that I use for a couple of personal things
(<http://linky.com.au>) and agree that, to some point, they're pretty trivial
to create.

But at some level of complexity in functionality, reporting, etc it'd have to
be attractive to people to just make use of another service. e.g., we can
build a newsletter system that is OK, but the bang for buck that MailChimp
provides is greater and so we often recommend that to clients.

------
dmor
does anyone know if they've made a public statement about how they'll deal
with the whole .ly domain risk that people have been buzzing about lately?

~~~
aditya
It's just noise: [http://www.observer.com/2010/media/bitly-says-libya-scare-
bu...](http://www.observer.com/2010/media/bitly-says-libya-scare-bunk-mitt-
romney-shut-down-mittly)

~~~
dotBen
As one of the two (former) owners of vb.ly that got pulled, I'm sure bit.ly is
concerned (and should be).

Given he was having his investors sign contracts on a $10m Series B investment
the same day, I'm not surprised John Borthwick said 'it was just noise' -- I'd
have done the exact thing myself. It's what you do as an entrepreneur to get
shit done.

Doesn't mean it is just noise for them.

The peanut gallery have gone to great lengths to tell us Libya is in its right
to set whatever rules it likes about domains (and even content of sites), that
it is reasonable for Libya to change those rules at any time and that it is
even ok for Libya to interpret those laws differently on a case-by-case basis.
(wow).

So with that in mind, I'd be fairly concerned.

Given the way things seem to be going over at NIC.ly I'd be interested to see
what kind of arrangement NIC.ly propositions to Bit.ly if/when they decide
they no longer like bit.ly linking to depictions of the prophet Mohammed
(PBUH) or hardcore pornography. I'm sure they won't simply can the domain but
come to some other arrangement (ie financial) to resolve this.

And if I was bit.ly, with everything I have in play now, I'd accept rather
than have my domain taken away from me and a significant part of my business
shut down. It's just business (Internet = Serious Business)

~~~
evansolomon
This is a small point, but funding doesn't get announced on the day it closes
ever. So no one was signing anything related to this deal once the .ly stuff
started happening.

------
justinchen
Does anyone use bit.ly pro? Any other white-label url shorteners people
recommend? <http://shortswitch.com> looks pretty decent.

------
hristov
Anybody know what it is about the pro account that makes it worth paying for?

