In announcing the launch of wp.me, a new URL shortening service for wordpress.com hosted sites, Matt Mullenweg stated the much-need obvious about the increasingly competitive market.
“While URL shorteners have had some incredible usage tied to the growth (and constraints) of Twitter, I question their sustainability as a business. This point was underscored a few days ago when a popular one, tr.im, announced they were going to shut down at the end of the year.”
As I mentioned in a recent post, the URL-shortening business doesn’t have a business model yet. Sure, there’s lots of talk about analytics and a news service but no one has shown they can make money from offering a URL-shortening service.
To date, all the URL-shortening business has demonstrated is that the barriers to entry must be fairly low given the number of players – tinyurl.com, bit.ly, cli.gs, tr.im, et al.
To date, the only viable service is tinyurl.com, a one-man operation (Kevin Gilbertson).
Among the new players, bit.ly has the most potential to be worth anything given it has raised some venture capital, and it was selected by Twitter to be its default URL-shortener, which makes you think that one day Twitter might use some of its VC dough to acquire bit.ly.
In the meantime, the biggest risk – and one that few people talk about – is what happens to all those shortened links when many of theses URL-shortening services go out of business.
Are we talking about a world with millions of dead links? Perhaps that’s an opportunity someone should consider, offering a premium service to revive dead links. (I’m being half-serious!)
More: Search Engine Land has a great overview of the URL-shortening services out there.
Mark-
The solution to this problem seems obvious (and I have even suggested it to Kevin Gilbertson). Kevin (or equivalent) needs to offer a packaged service (i.e. the software and related web pages) so that a company can put up an equivalent service on its own servers (and thus assure that the servers will stay up for a long period of time).
The form would then become: http://www.reducedurl.companyname.com/xvrRedUr
I got no response from my specific suggestion to Kevin. That was about a year ago
Geoff:Sounds like a solid proposal; surprised no one had implemented it.
Mark
"the URL-shortening business doesn’t have a business model yet"
That describes just about everything on the web that isn't running ads. And even most of those destinations/services may not have a sustainable model either. One day the piper will come calling.
Dave,
Unfortunately, that's a truism – at least will now.
I disagree. the business model is not the public site though. It is making a package available that can be used within a corporate domain. Sort of a private label little URL. Not a large business, but a nice one for a one man software shop.