4 ms·

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 g

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 16y ago
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 16y ago
  Plus white-labelled services.
  - msbarnett 16y ago
    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 16y ago
      I have a rudimentary shortener that I use for a couple of personal things (http://linky.com.au 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.
dotBen 16y ago
Also this is an example of where it is reasonable to build out a service that is itself a feature but a valuable one for a potential acquirer. If AOL, Microsoft, etc wanted to set up a url shortener, it might be worth their while simply obtaining the technical infrastructure, domain knowledge of the staff, business deals and of course all the existing links + data then to just start their own from scratch. (Mind you having taken $14m-$15m that does now make it an expensive aquisition. I'd have thought it a no brainer for the AOL/Microsoft/Yahoo's to pick up bit.ly for $20-$40m)

4 ms·

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 g

by iamjustlooking 16y ago

msbarnett 16y ago
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 16y ago
  Plus white-labelled services.
  - msbarnett 16y ago
    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 16y ago
      I have a rudimentary shortener that I use for a couple of personal things (http://linky.com.au 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.
dotBen 16y ago
Also this is an example of where it is reasonable to build out a service that is itself a feature but a valuable one for a potential acquirer. If AOL, Microsoft, etc wanted to set up a url shortener, it might be worth their while simply obtaining the technical infrastructure, domain knowledge of the staff, business deals and of course all the existing links + data then to just start their own from scratch. (Mind you having taken $14m-$15m that does now make it an expensive aquisition. I'd have thought it a no brainer for the AOL/Microsoft/Yahoo's to pick up bit.ly for $20-$40m)