By Sree Sreenivasan
DNAinfo Contrubuting Editor
In these DNAinfo columns and in my Columbia Journalism classes, I preach the importance of being open to new technology and new ideas. But sometimes, I am guilty of not being open-minded myself.
In December 2008, I was told by Ken Lerer, co-founder and chairman of the Huffington Post (I teach an entrepreneurship class with him) about Bit.ly, a new URL-shortening service. He said I should try it out right away, as Bit.ly had completely revamped the concept. I told him I was a big believer in URL shorterners (which create short URLs for sharing links in e-mails, blog posts, Facebook, etc), but I didn't need a new service since I was quite happy with SnipURL.com and TinyURL.com.
My mistake had been that I couldn't imagine how URL shorteners could possibly be improved, so I was reluctant to try something new, If I had continued to be stubborn about it, I'd have missed out on something that I would end up using every day.
Bit.ly allows you to create two kinds of short URLs. There's the standard shortening service, which, for example, takes my recent column on Twitter myths and misconceptions — http://dnainfo.com/20100419/morningside-heights/twitter-myths-misconceptions — and shortens it to http://bit.ly/c23r60. But also, it allows you to customize that short URL, which for this column I've called http://bit.ly/twdnainfo.
But Bit.ly's real innovation is in the way it allows you to track URL traffic. In the address bar, put a "+" at the end of the Bit.ly URL and you get instant statistics about the number of clicks on your URL, and what services and countries they came from. You can test it out by going to http://bit.ly/twdnainfo+. As others create their own Bit.ly URLs to your link, the site aggregates all the traffic.
Bit.ly has had enormous growth in the two years since it launched, and each day it shortens around 40 million URLs. In March 2010, there were 3.4 billion clicks on Bit.ly links, up from 2.5 billion clicks in January 2010 (in March 2009, that number was 87 million clicks). So far this year, Bit.ly has had 23 billion clicks.
Most people became aware of Bit.ly when it became the default shortener on Twitter, but you'll find Bit.ly is used in all kinds of places, including Facebook, where there were 100 million Bit.ly clicks posted in March 2010. With the introduction of the Bit.ly Pro service, more than 12,000 publishers and companies use Bit.ly as a "white-label" shortening service. Among the companies who've made their own custom short URLs are New York Times (nyti.ms), NPR (n.pr), Huffingon Post (Huff.to), Amazon (Amzn.to) and CNN (on.cnn.com).
One issue that comes up with such detailed tracking of your traffic is that you are likely to be disappointed the first time you see the stats of a specific URL. Let's say you have a thousand followers on Twitter. When you tweet something with a URL, you are likely to discover that you have less than 100 clicks. That's because so few people actually read every tweet, let alone decide to click through on every link. Before Bit.ly came along with its accurate stats, most folks just blindly presumed they had thousands of extra readers than they did. This is not Bit.ly's fault - it just provide more realistic numbers than you had access to before. It's like folks who don't look at their Google Analytics and just presume they have thousands of more readers than they actually do. Overall, we are all better off knowing the better numbers.
In order to learn more about Bit.ly, I asked Andrew Cohen, Bit.ly general manager, some questions via e-mail. Here are some excerpts:
Q: What is the relationship between Bit.ly and Twitter? How much traffic does it send you? Are you worried that if Twitter doesn't keep you as the default shortener you will suffer from a drop in usage?
A: For all intents and purposes Twitter stopped shortening URLs on Twitter.com in December 2009, about seven months ago. Today, the Twitter site represents less than 0.5% of bit.ly links shortened. We continue to work with the Twitter team and maintain close relationships with the major Twitter clients, but no one company accounts for more than a small fraction of bit.ly's links created on anyone day.
Today, bit.ly is growing at a blistering pace and continues to scale, irrespective of the change in rules last year on Twitter.com. Our usage is diverse and hugely distributed: bitly links are shared on Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, in email and newsletters, in instant messenging products like AIM and Meebo, by mobile manufacturers like Blackberry and Motorola, across SMS services, and through applications like Foursquare.
Q: How should folks use and interpret Bit.ly alongside services such as Google Analytics, Overture, etc.?
A: Bit.ly complements javascript-based tracking packages like Google Analytics or Overture, but it isn't a replacement for them. Danny Sullivan has two great articles on this topic: part 1, http://bit.ly/aiUjT1 and part 2, http://bit.ly/9egO0U.
Q: Any lessons for other folks trying to create startups in a field considered already well served?
A: One key thing that the bit.ly team did was to create a robust, open API, both for metrics and for URL shortening. bit.ly's openness has helped to make it one of the largest sharing platforms on the web.
To me, the main lesson from Bit.ly's success: There's still plenty of room for tech innovation these days, even in areas that most people think are fully mature. All it takes is imagination - and an open mind.
What do you think? Let me know in the comments or via Twitter @sreenet.
Every week, DNAinfo contributing editor Sree Sreenivasan, a Columbia Journalism School professor, shares his observations about the changing media landscape.
