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

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.