Bit.ly Wants To Make Money With A News Service; But Will Anyone Pay For It?
URL-shortener bit.ly has quickly become the platform of choice for people who want to share content on Twitter—with its links generating an average of over a billion clicks each month.
Context & Ripple Effects
Bit.ly's move from utility to business has been building all month: on July 16 it started warning users about malicious links through its service, the first sign it saw itself as more than a dumb pipe. Now, sitting on over a billion clicks a month generated by Twitter sharing, it plans to charge for a news service built on what those clicks reveal.
The timing matters because bit.ly occupies the measurement point of Twitter's distribution at the moment Twitter is courting mainstream attention — a redesigned homepage with top tweets and a search box went live on July 28, and the platform was estimated at $48 million worth of earned media in one month. Whoever owns the click stream owns a real-time map of what the crowd reads; the open question paidContent poses is whether anyone will actually pay for it.
First-order effects
- Publishers and newsrooms gain access to real-time click-through data showing which of their stories are spreading on Twitter, converting bit.ly's infrastructure position into a paid product.
- Bit.ly crosses from free utility to revenue-seeking company, betting that a billion-plus monthly clicks can support subscription pricing rather than remaining a cost center.
Second-order effects
- Twitter's own redesign — top tweets and search pushed to the front page — puts Twitter in competition for the same attention-discovery layer bit.ly wants to sell, while bit.ly remains wholly dependent on Twitter's platform goodwill.
- Rival shorteners must match bit.ly's trust and data features, such as its July malicious-link warnings, or risk losing the default slot in the sharing flow that generates the data.
Third-order effects
- If the paid-news bet works, link-shortening consolidates around whoever owns the click data, with the shortener becoming a loss-leader for attention analytics.
- Real-time distribution middlemen carry a structural dependency risk: platform owners like Twitter can absorb the discovery-and-ranking function themselves, squeezing out the tools that sit on top.
The trend: Free real-time-web plumbing is being repriced as paid attention-data businesses, with platform owners deciding how much room independent middlemen get to keep.