The short gloves are off. Earlier today, both Google and Facebook got into the URL shortening game with goo.gl and fb.me. Google’s move in particular is a direct challenge to bit.ly, the rising independent standard among link shortening services. Bit.ly’s response is in effect to ask publishers and consumers who they trust with all their data: Google or the rest of the Web?
To that effect, it is rolling out a new service called bit.ly Pro, which allows Web publishers to bit.ly to send out short links with their own branded (short) domain names such as nyti.ms, 4sq.com, mee.bo, or tcrn.ch. Publishers in the beta include AOL, Bing, foursquare, Hot Potato, the Huffington Post, Meebo, MSN, the New York Times, the Onion, TechCrunch, and the Wall Street Journal. What bit.ly is offering these publishers (us included) is a way to use a branded, trusted short URL which is powered by bit.ly. Publishers also get an analytics dashboard which shows realtime stats like the total number of clicks, and their distribution by geography and referring sites. Pro accounts is where all the money is, although bit.ly is not yet charging.
We’ve used our branded short domain tcrn.ch before with awe.sm for our story links we push out to Twitter, but switched to bit.ly because it was fast becoming the standard. In November, the bit.ly service shortened 2.1 billion links, up from 11.8 million the year before, and it currently accounts for about three quarters of all short links on Twitter.
As realtime streams increasingly become the communications bus of the Internet, the need for short links and their popularity will increase. The data surrounding those links—who passed them, which are the most popular, which are rising, which are falling—is potentially very valuable. To the extent that publishers and consumers don’t mind all of their data flowing through Google, they might just go with goo.gl and not worry about it. Bit.ly is betting they would rather control their own short links.
The appeal for publishers to use their own branded short URLs is that it acts like a verified link. Consumers who are familiar with the brand can learn to trust those links. In contrast, anything can be behind the generic short URLs, although bit.ly is taking steps to fight spam and malware abuse. Facebook with fb.me appears to be doing no more than just creating its own trusted short link for Facebook pages. Google, on the other hand, could easily expand goo.gl into a generic URL shortening service. Goo.gl launched only for Feedburner and Google Toolbar, but it is being used to shorten links from any and all domains.
Google was rumored to be sniffing around bit.ly earlier this year, but no acquisition ever materialized. Maybe it was just doing its homework.
I thought they bought suck.it
+1
This rules though. From a PR perspective, it rocks that they launched it as a ‘suck it’ to Goog, even if that’s TC’s spin on it. Makes me wa.nt
goo.gl will kill bit.ly? What a predicament indeed. Bitly are well aware of the implications of the impending google shortening onslaught, as you can see they are now launching bitly pro to increase their already wonderful features. See the detailed review about this bout: http://bit.ly/google-shortener-vs-bitly-review
is it a type of spam?
any idea when and If this Pro feature will be available to small sized publishers? I would gladly pay for something like this…
You could always build your own, like I did.
http://yourls.org/
http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dEJEdEVuQnRtZG9kdjExb3NEczlud0E6MA
I don’t know why anyone would use any of these services when you can use http://wi.nr — you can win prizes just for shortening URLs! Amazing.
most desperate campaign ever.
url shorteners are so lame and annoying.
this is a fad that will die…
tinyurl has been around since 2002
And how much $ did they make?
I’m a bit of a google fanboy, but I have to admit, I’m rooting for bit.ly on this one…
Thanks @AddyR — so am I! Amazing to see the big guns show up in this tiny business. More details about bit.ly pro here: http://bit.ly/4rY0bh — chk out the traffic swarming around the post real time – http://bit.ly/4rY0bh+
In google we trust… And still, when it’s TechCrunch mobile comming out?
Totally off topic, but +1 for mobile version, w/out the lame popups. I like TC, but it sucks on my G1 due to those obnoxious div ads that pop up when my cursor focus is on them. The divs end up covering 3/4 of the screen so I can’t read any of the TC content.
Yeah – I don’t see myself using Goo.gl or fb.me – bit.ly offers some nice stats even for the non pro user. I don’t see Fbook ever offering these and Google innovations have their strong points but I don’t know if they can pull this off.
I am sticking with Bit.ly and I think a lot of people feel the same way – they are not fu.kd yet by any means.
You doubt that Google can develop a similar service like bit.ly’s? Seriously?
Custom URL and real time stats. That’s doesn’t sounds like something Google can’t copy in short time. Maybe they’d need more time to create the timing rather than developing the function.
If they get more peoples using it, like high-profile blogs that already used Google for analytics, it could be just a matter of time before popular clients and maybe Twitter itself bend to popular demand to move to Google’s.
Google could only pull it off if they were to generate detailed statistics about the visitors to a website for analysis. Just imagine if they had the most widely used website statistics service that was used by around 40% of the 10,000 most popular websites. This kind of “Google Analytics” would give them a shot to pull it off against Bit.ly, wouldn’t it?
Oh sn.ap!
Nice! When will others be able to make use of the Pro account? I so very much want to use it.
Any info on the pricing? I hope they take into account small sites and bloggers too while deciding on the price. Keeping the price too high would mean only big publishers would go with the custom shortners.
A way to keep things fair would be the number of urls shortened per month or may be the amount of traffic each shortened url generates.
If it’s too costly, then host your own. There are dozens and dozens of free URL shortener scripts. This isn’t new stuff, it’s been around almost as long as the web.
Doesn’t anyone else remember all the .to domains? Go.to, hop.to, jump.to? Big fad in the 90s.
It is becoming more than a little worrying that every new market that starts to develop on the internet is now being aggressively infiltrated by Google. I remember Dave Winer complaining about Twitter effectively making Bit.ly the winner in the shortener sweepstakes but the other thing was the sheer volume of searchable content at the other end of those URLs.
I don’t really believe in the government intervening in the marketplace, but the Google tentacles are now spreading out in a very worrying way. Add to that the fact that Google isn’t the most forthcoming organisation in the world when it comes to what information about users that they store, for how long and what they do with it. You start letting them into more and more and it becomes problematic.
Facebook are seemingly going down this path as well. Unfortunately for them, they are just bumbling their way through the whole privacy debate like a bunch of drunk frat boys.
Saw this short url site today. http://abcde.com
I just tried to log in to my bit.ly account and my entire log of shortened url’s is gone. Vanished.
Ironic.
“The appeal for publishers to use their own branded short URLs is that it acts like a verified link. Consumers who are familiar with the brand can learn to trust those links.”
No, it doesnt act like a verified link. If NYTimes had the short url nyt.ms how would a consumer know that it’s more legitimate than nyt.me? I guess they would just “learn this” over time?
Seriously, other than nice looking urls for marketing purposes (and to hide affiliate codes), what use for short URLs is there outside of twitters char limitations? And the bit.ly analytics?? Are you kidding? Bit.ly is going to show me all the data on the url and clicks but NOTHING about what happens to that user when they get to my site? Thats where google will always have a leg up: their analytics package can tie in perfectly with their url shortening service.
If I were bit.ly, I would be partnering with all the web analytics companies right about now.
Everyone seems so happy to get these stats from bit.ly, but the stats do not tell you what happens when the users enter your site; just how they got their and where they came from (something an standard analytics package would already tell you).
Just wait and see. Bit.ly is nothing compared to what’s coming….
from where?
Clowns are coming from outer space.
Meh. I don’t understand the appeal of URL shorteners is other than Twitter where you are absolutely confined in the number of characters you can use.
Analytics can be done easily without needing to use someone like bit.ly to do it for you.
Interestingly this post was published in the TC Twitter stream with an is.gd short URL.
we are going live on bit.ly tonight
I think twitter is in its way too. o_0
i’m not opposed to url shortners and i think that althought the long, mindless, meaningless urls are more than annoying and inefficient, but i don’t think these shorties help the problem either. just makes me think of more excess and spam, as well as great security loopholes.
Are we next looking at social advertising campaigns where people will be paid for getting their personalized URL’s clicked. It seems fairly obvious to me now.Clearly put up what it means at http://bit.ly/7WzBvY
Withen 3 months Google URL will be number one we all know this is going to happen.
The Padrino Dot Com
http://bit.ly/2AitCq
Paying for white gloves is nice and all, but I just use YOURLS (http://yourls.org). Its a self installed and completely customizable php script for making your very own link shortener, attached to the domain of your choosing.
Along with wordpress plugins and your very own API you really can’t go wrong. Check it out http://yourls.org. Plus its easy to install!
Wondering when Google will Acquire this http://sho.li (Short Links) lol
Personal URL shorteners? Ive created a project for that :) http://smrls.net/ ! :)
This blog post links to Twitter five times and to the bitly home page once and to the bitly blog post announcing this not once. I hate techcrunch so much. One annoying arrington on a no-hand shake crusade. The pro-android slant on this entire blog is hilarious. It’s just petty. This isn’t a tech blog. URL shortening services aren’t technology. A new a fucking phone isn’t tech news. Ars Technica is a tech news site, this site is just vapid.
I meant techcrunch five times, not twitter. Ugh. :(
So. If you hate TC. Then why come here?
BTW. keeping the visits on your site is what really generates the revenue for TC. Kinda logic you would link to your own old articles?
How about http://ow.ly with the ability to earn money by using adds when redirecting…
I like http://crum.pl
Few extra features other than ability to shrink a list of links with weboftrust validation, but at least the name has meaning while being very short.
Also, this vey useful bookmarklet uses it to quickly give you short links to google maps!!!
http://savanttools.com/crumple-google-map-link.asp
well..they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I think bit.ly has done a great job moving rapidly to gain critical mass and add features. Its remarkably easy for users and developers alike (we use it for our iphone app RoadTweets). I think the custom URLs is an interesting idea – wish them the best of luck in this.
Uhm…suck it?? Think if you can use and add Goo.gl to your Google Analytics account…..bit.ly dead. :-)
Okay so techcrunch was using tcrn.ch again.
Goo.gl …I’m real happy for you, I’ma let you exist, but bit.ly HAS ONE OF THE BEST URL Shortening Pro service OF ALL TIME