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Good.ly – the URL shortener for Twitter that generates cash for charity

Mike Butcher

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Mike Butcher is the European Editor for TechCrunch. A former grunge rock drummer, he became a long time journalist, and has since written for UK national newspapers and magazines including The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The New Statesman. Mike is also a co-founder and shareholder of TechHub, a co-working space/service/community with several locations... → Learn More

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009
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You may have heard of a new URL-shortening service on the block called Good.ly. It’s a product spun out Skimlinks, an affiliate links aggregator we’ve covered extensively before. The connection is that Good.ly is linked to affiliate schemes which then generate cash for charities.

If you use Good.ly to make a product recommendation on Twitter (it’s also at @good_ly) and people click on and then buy what you suggested, Good.ly gives 55% of any earned referral fees to one of its nominated charities. So far the Dogs Trust, Crisis and ChildVoice International are signed up, but about 100 others have applied. The other 45% is used to run the service and continue marketing it.

Yesterday Good.ly donated 100% of all profits to charity as part of the #CharityTuesday trend on Twitter, so it’s obviously possible. Perhaps they should consider reducing their percentage as the service gets traction?

Good.ly shortened links are run through Skimlinks, and turned into an affiliate link where possible. Skilmlinks has 8,000 retailers so there’s a fair chance they’ll have a suitable product.

They’re also trying to get onto Seesmic Desktop, and you can vote for them here.

  • Grant Wilson

    Donate to children: Buy a child-labour product through Evil.ly!

    Great.

    Terms of use:

    “2. Avoid making slanderous comments about products/services you link to via Evil.ly”

    Yes, sir. Nonetheless: Using charity as a fig leaf to push the number of users of your commercial service is a dirty old trick.

  • http://www.jeromakay.com/ Vladimir Ghetau

    The idea is good, the domain name is not short, which kills the purpose of the service.

    Any domain above 4 letter should not be designed for mobile. (which is the main purpose of shortening after all, isn’t it? twitter, anyone?)

    • http://4gd.us 4good.co

      The 4 GooD Url Shortener at 4gd.us is used by 4Good affiliated sites and 4good registered causes to create short URLs that can be easily shared, tweeted, or emailed to friends. We do not make any profit from this service.
      If you are affiliated with a charity or cause please use our free service.

  • James King

    Fig leaf or trojan horse?

  • oakhouse

    this is not charity this is marketing. charity is when the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. skimlinks would not be doing this if it was not also promoting its business by generating pr like this. protest, preserve the meaning of words like good, don’t use if you want your children to understand the meaning of charity, it will also ruin twitter with spam but as very few people seem to be using it from looking at its website we are safe so far

  • http://richonlinejobs.com Richonlinejobs

    Oh! That is a great news. I have never heard about this. Thanks for the information.

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