Bit.ly Raises $10 Million Series B, Still Growing Like Crazy

http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/07/bit-ly-10-million/

by aditya • 16 years ago

40 31 16 years ago

dmor2• 16 years ago

does anyone know if they've made a public statement about how they'll deal with the whole .ly domain risk that people have been buzzing about lately?

aditya• 16 years ago

It's just noise: http://www.observer.com/2010/media/bitly-says-libya-scare-bu...

meatsock• 16 years ago

the article says 'they've got nothing to worry about' in terms of being on a sexual mission but it doesnt rule out an evolution of .ly's opinion of it's stake in the deal, and it seems to me they'd have final say about it. The 'scare' was ly asserting what amounts to their territory, no?

InclinedPlane• 16 years ago

It's far from just noise. Any company betting its business on a ccTLD needs to have a sane and level-headed understanding of the risks involved. And .ly is one of the riskiest, because it's run by an anti-western, anti-US dictatorship. You may think that because the regime currently supports the continued existence of a particular web business today that they will forever, but the history of such regimes argues that there is a lot of risk in that assumption. The regime may change its mind based on arbitrary criteria. It may decide that bit.ly is no longer in its favors. It may decide to nationalize bit.ly, redirecting the domain to a Libyan owned copy of bit.ly, prepopulated with existing shortened urls gathered from searches. Or, the country may undergo a change of regime. What happens when (not if) Gaddaffi dies (he is already nearly 70)? What happens if the country undergoes another coup? What happens if the country renames itself and gets rid of the old TLD?

This use/misuse of ccTLDs for commercial purposes (e.g. .tv, .ly, .it, .co, .to, etc.) is a relatively recent practice, there hasn't been enough time to decide if it's a safe practice or not. It'll likely take only one "disaster" to wake people up to the idea that there is indeed risk to basing your business on the cooperation of a country chosen solely because it has a catchy TLD abbreviation.

dotBen2• 16 years ago

As one of the two (former) owners of vb.ly that got pulled, I'm sure bit.ly is concerned (and should be).

Given he was having his investors sign contracts on a $10m Series B investment the same day, I'm not surprised John Borthwick said 'it was just noise' -- I'd have done the exact thing myself. It's what you do as an entrepreneur to get shit done.

Doesn't mean it is just noise for them.

The peanut gallery have gone to great lengths to tell us Libya is in its right to set whatever rules it likes about domains (and even content of sites), that it is reasonable for Libya to change those rules at any time and that it is even ok for Libya to interpret those laws differently on a case-by-case basis. (wow).

So with that in mind, I'd be fairly concerned.

Given the way things seem to be going over at NIC.ly I'd be interested to see what kind of arrangement NIC.ly propositions to Bit.ly if/when they decide they no longer like bit.ly linking to depictions of the prophet Mohammed (PBUH) or hardcore pornography. I'm sure they won't simply can the domain but come to some other arrangement (ie financial) to resolve this.

And if I was bit.ly, with everything I have in play now, I'd accept rather than have my domain taken away from me and a significant part of my business shut down. It's just business (Internet = Serious Business)

kno• 16 years ago

Personally I will not build a business at the mercy of the Libyan government.

dmor2• 16 years ago

I own a pretty awesome .ly domain which I was holding onto for a future business, but I'm definitely reconsidering as well

nir• 16 years ago

Ask HN: How does growing # of URLs convert to growing business? I have a small app that does the opposite of bit.ly (converts shortened URL to the original ones, adding some info like page title etc). It's also "growing like crazy" - no big deal considering that millions of new URLs are created every day - but it just means more hosting costs for me. Any ideas on how to convert this to revenue instead?

(The site is on http://therealurl.appspot.com/ )

mootothemax• 16 years ago

The article gives a couple of clues about how bit.ly makes money:

Its first source of revenues comes from Bit.ly Pro accounts, which are used by 3,000 companies and another individual 1,000 power users.

and

The bigger opportunity for bit.ly is in all the data it is harvesting about which links people are sharing in realtime... If you think about it, bit.ly knows what news is breaking because everybody is sharing it.

Interesting to think about moneytising the links in this way :-)

pchristensen• 16 years ago

Not to rain on their parade, but wasn't data mining supposed to make FoxMarks valuable too?

thorax• 16 years ago

We also sell vanity tiny URL shrinkers over at http://tinyarro.ws -- revenue is light but there are a good number of people who want control over their own domain shrinker.

The hosting costs for high levels of redirection are obviously quite light overall.

TinyArrows was more of a silly/fun project to see what we could do with unicode-based URLs. But we figured we might as well let people run their own domains off of it since we already supported so many domains.

We've also discussed with some marketing firms the idea of getting into meat-space advertisement. Basically where having a tiny URL people can visit with a smartphone (to see videos, etc) could over time become a great backup for stores with reduced retail salepeople or for home virtual tours, etc. QR codes aren't as universal as URLs are, so there's some mild opportunity here.

iamjustlooking• 16 years ago

How do you even begin to make a return on this money? Put redirects in a frame and put an ad in? Charge for some sort of premium service and hope people don't go to one of many other url shortening services?

msbarnett2• 16 years ago

Presumably they're hoping to monetize the data they're harvesting, with things like the mentioned social news site.

How realistic it is that that will be a home run for them, I'm not sure.

prawn2• 16 years ago

Plus white-labelled services.

dotBen2• 16 years ago

Also this is an example of where it is reasonable to build out a service that is itself a feature but a valuable one for a potential acquirer.

If AOL, Microsoft, etc wanted to set up a url shortener, it might be worth their while simply obtaining the technical infrastructure, domain knowledge of the staff, business deals and of course all the existing links + data then to just start their own from scratch.

(Mind you having taken $14m-$15m that does now make it an expensive aquisition. I'd have thought it a no brainer for the AOL/Microsoft/Yahoo's to pick up bit.ly for $20-$40m)

edash• 16 years ago

This is great PR. I'd be willing to bet this fundraising announcement was fast-tracked to counter the whole ".ly is unsafe" story from the past few days.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1763431

justinchen• 16 years ago

Does anyone use bit.ly pro? Any other white-label url shorteners people recommend? http://shortswitch.com looks pretty decent.

wave• 16 years ago

I run un-shortening service called http://unshort.me which is getting about 200K API requests/day.

  Sample of 1,000,000 requests from the service:

  bit.ly       612,170
  tinyurl.com   55,091
  goo.gl        41,812
  ow.ly         35,531
  is.gd         29,533 
  t.co          26,043
  j.mp          21,172
  other        178,648

techbio• 16 years ago

From the horse's mouth--do you see an organic access pattern in the resolved URLs, as a shadow of the popularity? Or are most of the 200K API requests batch processes?

adrianwaj• 16 years ago

What shortener would you suggest others use?

michaelbuckbee• 16 years ago

The service in there that surprised me was Google's. While the chrome shortener extension has been out for a while it wasn't officially announced until last week.

Given that the big value add (beyond white labeling) that is being provided by these services is analytics tracking I'd be deeply concerned about a new URL shortener run by the same company with the dominant web analytics package.

It's only a matter of time until goo.gl stats are displayed within Google analytics and when that hits I wonder how many will stay with the current shortener services.

hristov• 16 years ago

Anybody know what it is about the pro account that makes it worth paying for?

krelian• 16 years ago

I would have only taken 1 million to tell them it's a bad investment. This whole URL shortening business is so pathetic. OK, so twitter decided to be SMS compatible and limit messages to 140 characters, so what? It's an arbitrary limit attached to a standard that has already reached it's peak and can only go down from here. With 3G and smartphones becoming ubiquitous less and less people are going to be using sms for their messaging and the need to limit messages to 140 characters will diminish. It's a waining market not a startup opportunity.

rokhayakebe• 16 years ago

It's the data that is valuable, what people are interested in.

shaggy• 16 years ago

I really don't understand how shortening URLs is a viable business model? $10 million dollars is an enourmous sum of money to invest for something that provides almost no substantive value. That money would be better invested in software that allows (forces would be better) to design sane and usable URI schemes.

shin_lao• 16 years ago

I agree.

We built one as a proof-of-concept around our post-modern database engine. It costs orders of magnitude less than $ 10,000,000. I don't understand why they need that much money.

We could probably monetize it (advertisement on the main page) to the point of not having it costs us money to run it, but since it's more a promotional platform than a business...

(if you're curious: http://wrp.me/).

Bit.ly Raises $10 Million Series B, Still Growing Like Crazy

Related Stories