Sites like tinyURL .com .... how do they make money? Or are they like someone's hobby or pet project? Can't believe sending someone to a redirect link would make any money with adsense or anything like that. Seems all they would do is cost more money from all the bandwidth ... your thoughts?
YPN pays better than Adsense, so i guess thats the way they earn some money. that website is famous, so im sure he makes it well only with ads
He owns all of the links technically, so it's worth something. Everytime his members use tinyurl to spam, they build up traffic and links. I guess he can pull the urls away from members anytime he wants and use the traffic for himself. I also see a donate button and I bet that people who think that being allowed to use their urls costs anything, do wind up giving him something.
I just started a redirection site (see sig), so I have some insight. I did it mostly for links. I get a few new links every day. As I start getting serious traffic, the links will add up and I will monetize with ads. I am testing ads on selected URLs and people do click, so there will be income when I roll out the ads on all URLs. I minimized the code, so each page load is about 2 kb resulting in reasonable bandwidth costs. Correct, Blogmaster. When I find a link not conforming to the TOS, I scuttle it and send the traffic to the index page.
I remember a while back there was some controversy about tinyurl inserting Amazon affiliate code into Amazon links that didn't already have affiliate code. Some other affiliates were upset because they didn't think tinyurl's algorithm for doing this was effective, and that it might have been overwriting their own affiliate IDs.
Yup, that's how they make a lot of their money. Ebay is another one of the links they alter. I have no problem with this, as it is a good service.
"hmm...If I just collect the half cent commission from all the Amazon and eBay sales that no one else is collecting commission on, I can end up in a penthouse with my own ski slope and maybe someday meet Superman!" Or does that just show my age?
Hmmm, an interesting conversation. I have a 3 letter .com that I'm not using well, I might just throw up something like this
Maybe he run that site as hobby for now. Think about when he want to sell that site. Wow.. Many companies want to pay more thousands of dollars for that url.
FWIW I did that and the only people who noticed were scammers. I had an admin tool to review new links and they were either people just tooling around or really nasty stuff. Who from? and why?
Twitter used to auto-convert long urls in messages to TinyUrls so investors thought the company could make some money eventually using Twitter's user base, unfortunately for them Twitter has switched to bit.ly, which Twitter is rumored to be trying to buy.
You should definitely do a shortening site. If you want to sell that domain, let m e know, I may do it.
Depending on the niche, I would start a site for something that has the 3 letters as an abbreviation and choose the most profitable niche. Then if it does really well, you can sell it. 3 letter dot coms should be getting type ins, so it should not be too hard to monetize me thinks.
I don't know about tinyurl but bit.ly is using semantic analysis of every page that goes through its system using Reuters' Open Calais api. It will be able to create meme tracker, geo spatial information, etc. and sell those information to web research farms. It will be able create trend management software using millions of pages that are posted in Twitter. Bit.ly has only 12% market share but its adoption by Twitter will propel it to a higher market share.