Is there a future for the Url Shortening Companies?

URL shorteners are dead. Long live URL shorteners!
By Jonathan in awe.sm

Long Live Companies Like Tinyurl or Bit.ly

Editors Note:

Tinyurl.com is a company that shortens long links which are often based on the title of a given written piece. They have a number of different uses, which we will discuss on one of affiliated blogs. However the value of url shorteners like

TinyUrl.com
became very popular with daily users because Twitter users could only say what they had to say in 140 characters, and including links, became the popular way to do what everyone on the web wants to do, which of course is drive web traffic.

TinyUrl.com has an Alexa Toolbar rating of 808. This means that out of an estimated nearly 1 Billion websites (finding this actual statistic is elusive even for the most technical) that there are only 807 websites that get more traffic than TinyUrl.com

Bitly.com is another such link shortener, which also tracks link. A article published in TechCrunch.com stated:

Assuming bit.ly sold 20 percent of its shares to its new investors (the O’Reilly Alpha Tech Fund, Mitch Kapor, and Howard Lindzon), that would imply an $8 million pre-money valuation ($10 million post-money). Its market share of shortened links, as calculated by Tweetmeme, is only 13 percent. The biggest URL shortner out there is actually TinyURL, which commands a 75 percent share. So by that metric, if bit.ly is worth $8 million, TinyURL should be worth at least $46

If bit.ly Is Worth $8 Million, TinyURL Is Worth At Least $46 Million

That article however was published in March 2009. I wonder what actual financial affect the latest news about Twitter below, will have on these companies.

Last week, 364 days after first announcing their t.co link wrapping service, Twitter started rolling out automatic URL shortening on Twitter.com. URL shorteners existed long before Twitter and will continue to exist, but this move by Twitter means the need to shrink links will no longer be mainstream in the way it has become over the last few years.

While this may be the end of consumer-facing URL shorteners as we know them, it’s a key part of Twitter’s efforts to become more approachable to mainstream users and build a bigger, more engaged audience. Achieving those goals will make Twitter even more valuable to publishers and marketers, for whom it will be that much more important to understand how Twitter drives traffic and ultimately revenues. 

1.  If lots of people are getting hacked, phished, or otherwise scammed from clicking on links in Twitter, they’ll stop clicking.
2. The reason Twitter doesn’t talk about is that they need the data. Facebook and Google collect information on every click out from their sites, but before t.co Twitter knew nothing about where they were sending their users. Knowing not just what content is being shared but also knowing what content is being clicked is essential to Twitter’s ability to serve their marketer customers in the long-term.

http://blog.awe.sm/2011/06/17/url-shorteners-are-dead-long-live-url-shorteners/

 Courtesy of Awe.sm:

Jonathan is a co-founder of awe.sm and the one who deals with all things not code. Before awe.sm, he spent 4 years at Yahoo! in various roles across corporate development, business operations, and product management. Jonathan blogs (infrequently) on his eponymous website and has a full CV on LinkedIn.

The Article Title linked below is from Jonathan's Website:

The streaming music business is dead, long live the 

streaming music business

Editors Note: Where have I seen a title like that before.