On: Twitter URL Service Bit.ly Says No to Ads, Yes to Data-Mining News

[axod]

It's genius! Instead of slapping advertising on, you build a news site. Hmm wait a minute, how does the news site make money again?

[brandnewlow → axod]

Yeah, seriously. How do they make money? Selling the news back to other sites?

[ryoshu → brandnewlow]

They make money by aggregating the activity and doing real-time and historical analysis. People will pay very good money for those things, especially with the size of the datasets bit.ly has at its disposal.

[axod → ryoshu]

>> "People will pay very good money for those things, especially with the size of the datasets bit.ly has at its disposal."

Who? Why will they pay good money for it? How do they get a ROI?

[andrewbadera → axod]

Marketers, mostly. Researchers, a little bit.

[brandnewlow → ryoshu]

Cool. That makes sense. They're going to sell aggregate data. Sign me up...

Then why do they need a news site? Is it just a big marketing tool for their data sales business?

[axod → brandnewlow]

I think next they make a widget so you can tweet about the news.

[brandnewlow → axod]

Which makes money....how?

At some point, they have to ask people for money. if they're not going to ask users for money, then they're just going to be another B2B business whose job is to sell stuff to other businesses, advertising or not.