DISQUS

chudson · 8 months ago

Quick comment to those who mentioned that this post went out on twitter with a link in tinyurl. The Wordpress to Twitter plugin I use only offers TinyURL. Good catch.
dremoran · 8 months ago

Good points. But I think bitly can survive even beyond the twitter ecosystem. The analytics it provides can be valuable to small- and medium-sized businesses conducting their own email marketing campaigns (whether through Constant Contact or an in-house system). The timeline component illuminates the effects of externalities on a message's response rate. A bitly link can also be put behind banner ads.

Beyond marketing uses, a bitly link within an email tells me how many recipients read my email, closing the loop on the message without using a read receipt.

Even as a meager consumer, I would pay a small monthly fee for bitly.
chudson · 8 months ago

Very good point - I do a fair amount of email marketing myself and think you've outlined a useful use case.
Engago Team · 8 months ago

As Bit.ly has started out completely free, how will they manage to impose a premium service?
They will need to build a lot of usefull features into Bit.ly before anyone is going to pay.
chudson · 8 months ago

Yes, I agree - the road for any of the URL shortening services is a long one. There might be an interesting business here, but it's far from assured.