Bit.ly, the biggest link shortening service around, just raised another modest $1.5 million in convertible debt from all of its existing investors on a pro rata basis, including betaworks, Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech, Ron Conway, Mitch Kapor, Chris Sacca, Howard Lindzon, and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. The funding amount appeared in a new SEC filing and I confirmed it with betaworks CEO and bit.ly president John Borthwick. “Everybody round the table wanted to put in more money,” he says. “No one wanted to let anyone else in.”
The round was structured as a convertible note because it was faster to do it that way, says Borthwick. He also gave me a quick update on bit.ly. Last month, 2.7 billion short bit.ly links were clicked on, with last week being the biggest ever (744 million short links clicked). As the realtime Web grows, so does bit.ly
The web has no shortage of URL shorteners. In fact, there are so many that they’re all kind of blending together and I have no idea where to turn beyond the de-facto one Twitter uses, Bit.ly. But today, a new one has piqued my interest.
ShadyURL (made by Wonder-Tonic) is awesome because well, it creates shady URLs. Rather than focusing on making a URL as tiny as possible to spread on a site like Twitter, ShadyURL takes a regular web address and converts it into something that looks as sinister as possible.
The Realtime Web is a hard thing to measure because it doesn’t exist only on traditional Web pages. It also exists in stream readers and desktop clients and mobile phones. And it is not just Twitter and Facebook. It is also bit.ly and TweetDeck and Seesmic and Tweeite and realtime search on Google and Bing, and the list goes on and on. So while we can look at comScore and see that Twitter.com in the U.S. was still flat in December, 2009 with 20 million unique visitors (up slightly from 19.4 million in November), that doesn’t account for the overall Twitter ecosystem or the larger Realtime Web beyond it.
All we have is Twitter CEO Evan Williams’ word that usage hit an all-time high a week ago. There is no comprehensive data, only proxies like comScore. But in a post yesterday, betaworks (and bit.ly) CEO John Borthwick added some more data points to help paint a picture of the Realtime Web and how fast it is growing. Borthwick is one of the leading investors in the Realtime Web and he has access to a lot of data, including from bit.ly (the leading link shortener), TweetDeck (the largest Twitter client), and Twitterfeed (the main way to publish RSS feeds to Twitter). The data Borthwick presents is also directional and a proxy, but it is illuminating nonetheless.
Let’s start with the Twitter data. He notes that about 50 percent of Twitter API calls are outside Twitter.com. This number represnets data going back and forth, not people, and includes data from bots and machine clicks. In order to get a better estimate of the size of the overall reach of Twitter, Borthwick took Google Trends data for Twitter and “key clients” and “scaled that chart” over what appears to be comScore data for Twitter.com. The result is the chart above, which shows the Twitter ecosystem reaching about 60 million people, with 20 million coming from Twitter.com and 40 million coming from elsewhere. By this analysis, the ecosystem is twice as large as Twitter.com itself.
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics, as Mark Twain once said. A couple days ago, I wrote a post titled, “What Happened To bit.ly’s Market Share” after I noticed some new statistics on TweetMeme which suggested that the market share for short URLs has shifted in the past few months and is actually diversifying as more and more short URLs inundate the Web.
John Borthwick, the investor who incubated bit.ly and then spun it off from betaworks, didn’t like that headline because it called into question bit.ly’s continued dominance. He also didn’t like it because there was a problem with the underlying statistics. Previously, the TweetMeme stats showed only the top 5 URL shortening services in a given 24-hour period. But then TweetMeme took down the stats for a couple months while it reworked the underlying architecture to better scale with the incredible growth in these kinds of links. When the stats quietly came back over the holidays, they looked different. Instead of bit.ly showing a 70 to <a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/10/despite-all-the-angst-around-its-demise-trim-wil
It seems like everyone and their mother now has their own URL shortening service, or at least their own short domain. Short URLs have almost become a branding thing. But as the use of short links keeps going up, the market share among different URL shortening services is fragmenting. The biggest URL shortening service is still bit.ly, with more than 2 billion links a month, but it now only has a 56 percent market share of short links on Twitter, compared to nearly 80 percent last summer. The drop wasn’t noticed before because TweetMeme, which keeps statistics on short URL market share, pulled its stats page for a couple months as part of a site upgrade to make it more scalable. But now that stats page is back up, and it is tracking 3.1 million unique links per day compared to 2.5 million last November..
So what accounts for bit.ly’s 24-point drop? When TinyURL was the default service on Twitter it had a 75 percent share, and now it has only 8 percent, so these things can shift quickly. But bit.ly is still the default link shortener on Twitter.com and many Twitter clients such as Tweetdeck. Some of the decline can be attributed to the launch of bit.ly Pro, which is a white-labeling short link service for publishers. We use it to publish links to our posts on Twitter with our tcrn.ch domain, which used to be bit.ly links. Even though bit.ly is still powering those links, it doesn’t get credit for any custom domains. In fact, tcrn.ch is now one of the top 100 short domains (see below). So to the extent that large publishers such as AOL, Bing, foursquare, the Huffington Post, Meebo, MSN, and the New York Times switched to custom bit.ly Pro domains, those are no longer counted for bit.ly in the stats above.
With more than two billion links a month passed through its link shortening service, bit.ly can see what is some of the most buzzed about and shared content on the Web. Today, it is exposing the most popular videos people share through bit.ly on Bitly.TV, which is the second project under bit.ly Labs (the super-short j.mp URL shortener was the first).
With bit.ly being the main way people share links on Twitter, Bitly.TV might as well be called Twitter TV. The videos featured are based on bit.ly’s bitrank algorithm. “The algorithm looks at velocity, popularity and persistence,” says general manager Andrew Cohen. “We’re examining the social distribution history of each video to determine what is trending, and to predict what will go viral.”
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.
With the rise of Twitter, we’ve also seen the rise of link shorteners (standard URLS take up too many characters). The king of the link shorteners right now is bit.ly, which is the default shortener on Twitter and accounts for more than 75 percent of all short URLs on the service. Every month, bit.ly shortens about 1 billion links. For spammers, that’s one huge honey jar.
The flip side of a short link like this one—http://bit.ly/6PwhcP—is that you can’t tell by looking at it what website it redirects to. It could be a TechCrunch post, or it could be a spam site. There’s no way to tell the difference when you see the link in a Tweet. (Don’t worry, it’s a TechCrunch post).
The spam problem is getting worse, which is why bit.ly is taking more serious measures to sniff out spam behind its short links. Today it announced it is working with three new services to fight spam and malware: VeriSign’s iDefense, Websense Threatseeker Cloud, and Sophos.
Perhaps the top reason to use Bit.ly (beyond obviously shortening links) is for its analytics. The service makes it easy to see all sorts of data about your short URL links going out to services like Twitter. But sometimes looking at the bigger picture is more interesting than individual data. Now you can see that too.
Today, the service has unveiled its new Bit.ly Click Summary. This is a new page on the site that allows you to see aggregate data for all your Bit.ly links over a set period of time. Currently, this only works for the past 7 days, but Bit.ly says that monthly views will be added soon as well.
Here’s an interesting factoid. Panera Bread, the national bakery and cafe chain, has blocked all Bit.ly links from users who happen to be using Panera’s free WiFi. In a tweet to user who was inquiring about the issue, Panera’s official Twitter handle responded that the coffee shops have “blocked b/c link is hidden & can’t determine content. Want to keep a friendly-family environment for all.” Hmm.
It appears that Panera has also blocked many of the other popular URL shorteners as well. It’s true that a short URL obscures the target address and present opportunities for spammers, but many URL shorteners offer previews of the longer links or content to mitigate the chance of accessing a site you don’t want to visit.
