What is the business model for a URL shortener service?
How do URL shortener services make money?
Like https://bitly.com/, http://qurl.com/, http://urltea.me/, http://blue.gg/ There's no ads whatsoever on those sites.
I'm really curious, so they are able to live off donations (if any) alone ?
In other words, I'm interested what will the business model of these companies look like?
-
You can find this out with a simple google search. A [relevant answer](http://www.quora.com/Analytics/What-is-bit-lys-business-model-other-than-being-a-freebie) to your question on quora, regarding bit.ly: – Tomeduarte 13 years ago
1 Answer
Bit.ly makes money through its enterprise service, offering custom shortened URLs (using its technology to manage shortened URLs through a branded domain, like pep.si) and advanced analytics.
Other sites are making money simply through advertising on their main site. TinyURL gets ~3,000,000 monthly unique visitors, which translates into an even higher number of page views -- the banner ads displayed on the site likely provide a good amount of revenue. URLtea.me looks like it has paid links on the front page -- because so many people are linking to the URLtea.me domain, those links likely pass a high SEO value.
Blue.gg seems to be a promotional effort / "cool factor" property for a digital creative agency. I imagine a substantial number of less popular URL shorteners are run by people simply for the cool factor or convenience of personalized, super-short links. Because these services are only redirecting people rather than serving up content of their own, the bandwidth used is really very low -- many services aren't being created to make money, because they don't cost that much money to run.
