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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

by nir 16y ago

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/ http://therealurl.appspot.com/ )

mootothemax 16y ago
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 16y ago
  Not to rain on their parade, but wasn't data mining supposed to make FoxMarks valuable too?
  - mediaman 16y ago
    There are many businesses for whom vague hand-waving about data mining is supposedly a monetization strategy. Most of them don't work, because people forget that not all data is valuable.
  - photon_off 16y ago
    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?
thorax 16y ago
We also sell vanity tiny URL shrinkers over at http://tinyarro.ws http://tinyarro.ws -- revenue is light but there are a good number of people who want control over their own domain shrinker. The hosting costs for high levels of redirection are obviously quite light overall. TinyArrows was more of a silly/fun project to see what we could do with unicode-based URLs. But we figured we might as well let people run their own domains off of it since we already supported so many domains. We've also discussed with some marketing firms the idea of getting into meat-space advertisement. Basically where having a tiny URL people can visit with a smartphone (to see videos, etc) could over time become a great backup for stores with reduced retail salepeople or for home virtual tours, etc. QR codes aren't as universal as URLs are, so there's some mild opportunity here.

by nir 16y ago

mootothemax 16y ago

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 16y ago
Not to rain on their parade, but wasn't data mining supposed to make FoxMarks valuable too?
- mediaman 16y ago
  There are many businesses for whom vague hand-waving about data mining is supposedly a monetization strategy. Most of them don't work, because people forget that not all data is valuable.
- photon_off 16y ago
  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?

thorax 16y ago

We also sell vanity tiny URL shrinkers over at http://tinyarro.ws http://tinyarro.ws -- revenue is light but there are a good number of people who want control over their own domain shrinker. The hosting costs for high levels of redirection are obviously quite light overall. TinyArrows was more of a silly/fun project to see what we could do with unicode-based URLs. But we figured we might as well let people run their own domains off of it since we already supported so many domains. We've also discussed with some marketing firms the idea of getting into meat-space advertisement. Basically where having a tiny URL people can visit with a smartphone (to see videos, etc) could over time become a great backup for stores with reduced retail salepeople or for home virtual tours, etc. QR codes aren't as universal as URLs are, so there's some mild opportunity here.