Recently I've been taking a look at url redirection / masking sites. Some of them get heaps of traffic, and when I mean heaps, I'm talking about 10000+ uniques a day. Yet, I look at their sites and am baffled at how they make money. www.tinyurl.com www.shorten.ws http://lix.in tinyurl seems and shorten.ws have no ads whatsoever when using their services. Are these guys nuts? Has anyone else looked into such an industry? Thanks.
At least for TinyURL what I see they used Adsense and Amazon ads. If this brings the big cash for them I dont know. Maybe. But they have to be doing something right since they have so many users
Unless they will implement more ads at a later date? Their current google ads are in a bad position, so I doubt they would be making much dough.
I was also amazed by the positioning of the Ads and the design of the site. But it seems to work and attracts users. If I had that amount of traffic to the site I would at least tried to get some real advertisers or something.
I bought the script (plus a nice template for it with Adsense integration) that these sites are using and wanted to make my own Shorten URL site. I also wanted to register a 2-letter LL.XX domain for the site. However, I have decided rather not to go for this, as I'm afraid of the script being abused for masking links to illegal sites and other fraudulent activity. And I would then have a lot of work checking all URLs in the admin panel, etc. Some good ones that I know and use are: dn.vc oh.vc With dn.vc you can shorten your URL to even e.g. dn.vc/x (put e.g. "x" as the keyword) and then you get a really short URL. I use it especially when I need to shorten URLs of links in my sig, as they are too long sometimes. Some of these sites are making money with Adsense, others have not their sites monetized (yet). However, with tons of traffic (if any), they can simply sell their sites for nice bucks anytime.
anonym.to gets a lot of traffic and they have a landing page that tells you your being redirected, however they don't put ads on there and im certain they have 1000's of uniques a day. F00lz
Hello andrej, Do you have a link to the script you bought? I would be interested in taking a look at it. I don't see the point of putting your keyword into your shortened url as it's very unlikely it will rank well your short url. Thanks.
The point of the keyword (actually it's not a keyword, just whatever you want) is to make the URL as short as possible, so that it e.g. saves space in your forum signature. So if you put a one character keyword, you can get as short URL as e.g. dn.vc/9 I've sent you a PM regarding my script.