5 ms·

Ask HN: How are url shorteners making money?

• melvinram 18y ago
  Or is it because they are so limited in functionality that cost of server processing is bare minimal?
• cperciva 18y ago
  I understand that some of them make money by inserting their IDs into referral links.
  • melvinram 18y ago
    hmm... that seems shady... unless they make that clear ahead of time.
• mikeyur 18y ago
  They don't. To be honest the majority of url shorteners don't make any money at all. I know because I run one. http://urli.ca http://urli.ca It costs me nothing to run because it uses next to no resources on a server that I already pay for and I got the domain for free. //Sidenote, if anyone is interested in using the service, we have a really simple api (as all the services do) http://urli.ca/api http://urli.ca/api note: the urls auto-increment (ie. ab/ac/ad/ etc.)
  • benhoyt 18y ago
    I run DecentURL.com, and have had basically the same experience. I made a few dollars off some "$7 premium services" for a while, but recently stopped running those as there just wasn't enough demand. Not that I made "selling" DecentURL a priority -- so I shouldn't say too much. I'm turned off the ads-during-the-redirect thing, but I can see where it might be an effective money-maker. I like what cli.gs is doing.
• hardik 18y ago
  I think there is a huge indirect value for the owners to be derived from the data and trends it shows.
  • Alex3917 18y ago
    Correct, bit.ly knows all the most popular links on Twitter in real time. This is worth a ton, or at least it could be.
    • davidw 18y ago
      To who? How do you package that up and sell it to someone?
      • eddycole 18y ago
        Think: pulling that data into a techmeme.com style aggregator/ranking site for the most popular urls people are linking to. Imagine how dynamic it would be - things that got linked to the most would percolate up to the top. you could watch in near real time as news breaks and gains traction. I've had a service like this in mind for a while and haven't pulled the trigger because I'm a chronic procrastinator.
        • davidw 18y ago
          That's a cool idea. However, it's still basically an advertising business unless you're charging for access to that site. And all of a sudden you have introduced a big incentive for people to spam/game your service. I guess what I'm getting at is... some data is valuable, but doesn't, at least to ignorant me, seem to have a market for it. (Edit: BTW, I'd be happy to be proven wrong... for instance, I have this site where the data might be worth something, and the ads aren't worth much: http://shoplist.dedasys.com/ http://shoplist.dedasys.com/ )
          • kortina 18y ago
            There's an important distinction to make between "advertising business" and "data business." Data can be useful for advertising, but can also be useful for tons of other stuff--news, filtering, etc.
• nuggien 18y ago
  you could probably run it on a $5 dreamhost account and get away with it.
  • melvinram 18y ago
    I suspect tinyurl's hosting account costs more than $5
  • duskwuff 18y ago
    Dreamhost actually frowns heavily on URL redirection sites, as they tend to get abused by spammers if submissions aren't carefully screened.
• markat2 18y ago
  It would seem that, for isntance. tinyurl.com has ads on the homepage. The service probably costs close to $0 to run so any upside is profit.
  • gaius 18y ago
    How? It may need little CPU or bandwidth, but at the end of the day it's hardware, it needs to be somewhere, be powered and cooled, etc etc. The cost may be low enough to be paid by the owner personally, but it's not going to be $0.
    • m_eiman 18y ago
      Like someone else said, the load is low enough to run on dirt cheap shared hosting like Dreamhost. So even if the cost isn't zero, it's less than what most people spend on snacks.
    • redrobot5050 18y ago
      It could be free if it was written on AppEngine, and it stayed within the "free" quota. (For the record I know TinyURL.com was not, but i'm pointing out that a newer/similar service could be.)
  • mikeyur 18y ago
    It costs a bit more than $0. So many people use the service, every long url on twitter is automatically shortened with the service. I think they have at least a single dedicated server, if not more. So definitely not $0, perhaps a couple hundred bucks which is made up with google ads.
• z3r0p4r4d0x 18y ago
  I don't know about most of them, but since Twitter is gaining more people with each passing day, a lot of website marketplaces have buyers interested in URL shortening services. Maybe they want to put ads on it, maybe Affiliate stuff, but selling your service is definitely a money maker.
• ckunte 18y ago
  Market research.
  • deleted 18y ago
    [deleted]
• silversun 18y ago
  I am awfully new to this game, but I do recall seeing a url shortener which enabled additional tracking to the initiating user. For example, showing the time distribution of the clicks along with originating sites. I may be stretching this a bit far, but just for the heck of it, if I wanted to figure out which social networking website had a larger pull for me in distributing information, this type of service would allow me to do that. (don't ask me why? :) ) The way I would build a business model around a URL shortener would be through those types of value add services which would draw users back to the site (ad-revenue, or potentially in-depth "pay" analytics), in addition to the already-mentioned resultant data insights.
  • Jem 18y ago
    > I do recall seeing a url shortener which enabled additional tracking to the initiating user I think you mean http://cli.gs http://cli.gs ? :)
• rlm 18y ago
  I have seen some url-shorteners offer paid analytics packages for magazines etc., that use the service in their articles.
• peterbraden 18y ago
  well an evil strategy I wouldn't rule out is to make sure that you have loads of links in your system - you now own these links- then after a while insert an advertised page into the flow after a user clicks on one of the links. wouldn't be surprised if some of the shorteners start doing this at some point.
• alabut 18y ago
  There's a lot of tinyurl clones that basically do the same job, only focusing on providing redirects for long urls, but one that does more and that I've liked a lot recently is http://tr.im http://tr.im - it got me to switch after years of using tinyurl, mainly because it carries a history of links you've previously shortened and shows some cool traffic stats for each one. So I can see them adding even more features for a paid pro account.
• themanual 18y ago
  simple. they dont have to make much money. They can run of a shared server as it just has redirects. Also, they get money from paid advertising on their website. DONE!
• apgwoz 18y ago
  Tinyurl has ads, but I wonder how effective it is. People can avoid going there altogether since they provide an API. As do most other services. Simply making use of that API in your own services, software means that their number of page views doesn't increase. Now, it may get annoying, but having a "You are redirecting to http://somelongurl.com http://somelongurl.com" sort of page, would not only be safer for all, but would also provide another spot for ads. (I know one of the services does this already, but I dont' remember which one)
• pierrefar 18y ago
  I think I can answer this one, as I own the URL shortener Cligs ( http://cli.gs/ http://cli.gs/ ). There are two main approaches to running a URL shortener: a "basic" approach that simply does a redirect and a more advanced approach with value added services (like analytics). A basic redirect comes in two types: 1. A proper HTTP redirect (a 30x code, of which only 301 is of proven SEO value). 2.a. A cloaked redirect in which you redirect to a page on the shortening service's website that displays two frames with one frame being the destination page and the other frame being a page you control. 2.b. An interstial redirect in which the initial landing is a page on the service's website that "refreshes" after a few seconds to the destination. If you do option 1, then you can't make money off the redirects. You can try to make money off the people using your site. If you look at tinyurl.com, that's exactly what they do: find the AdSense block on the right hand side edge of the site. Both of options 2 offer you a real chance to display advertising. Adjix does that and I have no idea about the kind of revenue they're seeing, but you can see their payout rates at http://web.adjix.com/AdjixLinkerInfo.html http://web.adjix.com/AdjixLinkerInfo.html . Option 2b is very interesting but the most annoying for the user IMHO. Linkbee allows you put interstial ads (see http://www.linkbee.com/create.php http://www.linkbee.com/create.php ). The value add services on top of redirection are very valuable. There are two kinds: a. Services that add value to the short URL creator (i.e. the service user). A great example is analytics which tells you a lot about who's clicking through. Competing on analytics is an effective business strategy ;) There are other kinds of value add services, some of which tie back to options 2a and 2b above (i.e. get the user to earn money from their links). b. Services that are unrelated to URL shortening per se, but are valuable. I've seen a few comments in this thread about the value of the data gained from tracking traffic. I'll leave this one to your imagination - run wild! There is a third way to make money: white-label services. I won't explain the business logic behind this, so I'll just point you to my recent announcement on the Cligs blog: http://cli.gs/MvDp1s http://cli.gs/MvDp1s . Cligs is offering for-pay fully branded short URLs with the analytics built right in. I know of at least one other service that will launch with a similar product soon (they're in testing!). So how can you make money? It's a very competitive market, and the cost of entry is tiny, the user loyalty is almost non-existent, and the traffic can be huge requiring good service architecture. My point from the above is that you will be able to make money as there are ways to create value for your users you can charge for, but expect to get a few bruises on the way. Finally, a personal note: It's a great market to learn business skills in because it's so competitive and the popular services are run by some really smart people. Can you really value the lessons you learn from competing in this market? It beats any MBA you care to point to. And yes, you should use Cligs as it's the best around: http://cli.gs/ http://cli.gs/ :)
• yan 18y ago
  "How do we make money? Simple. One word: Volume." (edit: i'm referencing this: http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/video/clips/first-citywide-change-bank/229045/ http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/video/clips/first-cit...)
• thorax 18y ago
  They can make some money indirectly. As background, we made http://tinyarro.ws http://tinyarro.ws. For our service, we make money indirectly by mentioning our other services/sites as friendly as possible. We've seen stellar response from that. It helps that our URL shrinker is new/cute/silly and something people like to show-off on Twitter "the shortest URLs on earth". But our plan isn't to make any money off of the URL shrinking-- it's simply a toy we want to share because it's a really inexpensive project and a good way to promote our other sites.
• lazyant 18y ago
  I don't know if I have seen it or not: is there a kind of the opposite service?; a 'de-obfuscator' that takes a meaningless url like someblog.com?p=245 or one of the long corporate url full of numbers and translates it into abetterurl.com/someblog/the_title_of_the_article ? I know because of SEO a lot of urls are now more human readable but it wold be an interesting idea if it hasn't been done yet (too lazy to google).
  • muitocomplicado 18y ago
    I thought about the same thing the other day, because url shorteners are really only useful for applications like Twitter or Mobile devices where size matters, but for anywhere else a more readable URL is much more useful if the destination website doesn't have it already.
• LurkingGrue 18y ago
  Volume?