Charles Hudson's Blog - Latest Comments in The bit.ly Investment Makes Sense to Me (the Feedburner of Twitter)

Re: The bit.ly Investment Makes Sense to Me (the Feedburner of Twitter)

chudson — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 18:08:22 -0000

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.

Re: The bit.ly Investment Makes Sense to Me (the Feedburner of Twitter)

Engago Team — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 17:04:40 -0000

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.

Re: The bit.ly Investment Makes Sense to Me (the Feedburner of Twitter)

chudson — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 12:39:45 -0000

Very good point - I do a fair amount of email marketing myself and think you've outlined a useful use case.

Re: The bit.ly Investment Makes Sense to Me (the Feedburner of Twitter)

dremoran — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 11:13:29 -0000

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.

Re: The bit.ly Investment Makes Sense to Me (the Feedburner of Twitter)

chudson — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 09:58:50 -0000

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.