How Url Shorten Company Make Money

Many, including some readers of Genbeta, wonder how companies that are dedicated to shorten URLs earn money. While it is true that the boom of this type of services was seen a couple of years ago, today there are still a few well known to all: bit. ly, tinyurl, goo. gl, etc. The question of how these services earn money is very common because when you use them you do not see apparently any monetization system, but in this article we will try to explain how they generate money.

Direct or indirect redirection? Within the URL shorteners there are ones that redirect the user directly to the shortened page and others that send the user to the service page where they show the original contents in a frame. In the second case where advertising comes into play, since in recent years there have been several shorteners who have used the second method to introduce Google AdSense and ads from other advertising platforms.

Obviously the amount of money that different shorteners are able to generate will depend directly on the traffic they are able to redirect through their services. Services for the company and analytics Other services offer something more besides the basic functions of shortening URLs. The main reference in this case is bit. ly are your package for companies. For $ 995 per month any company can create their own short addresses in addition to having access to an analytics service that shows all kinds of statistics on the clicks received by the different published links. Many companies see a lot of value in this type of statistics (in the same way that they find value in other data from Google Analytics and other similar services), as they can quickly see which are the most popular links or where users are from. they click on them It is, in short, an added value to the basic function of shortening.

The reality of shorteners But the reality is that very few shorteners are able to build a stable business model around their main activity. That is one of the reasons why in recent years we have seen many (many) shorteners appear and disappear. Only a few have remained in time. We must also bear in mind that they are services that require very little initial investment and hardly generate costs. In addition, some such as tinyurl, belong to a single person so it is not strictly necessary to generate a significant amount of money.