Social Search
Today we're pleased to announce the beta launch of bitly's search platform and reputation monitoring service. — bitly shortens 80 million URLs every day, give or take a few. Now, with our new search technology, we're crawling and classifying every URL we shorten to create …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is bitly's second public attempt to answer the monetization question it has carried since July 2009, when paidContent asked whether anyone would pay for its planned news service. In the two years since, the company shipped bit.ly 1.3 and acquired Twitterfeed, assembling publishing pipes on top of its core asset: roughly 80 million shortened URLs a day.
The new beta turns that asset into a product — crawling and classifying every URL it shortens, then selling search and reputation monitoring on top. The AdAge pickup the same day signals the pitch is aimed squarely at marketers and brand managers rather than the developers who made the shortener popular.
First-order effects
- Brands gain a beta tool that classifies every URL passing through bitly, adding reputation monitoring to the click analytics they already get from shortened links.
- bitly begins charging for intelligence layered on a utility it previously gave away, testing whether enterprise buyers will fund the shortener's economics.
Second-order effects
- Dedicated social-media monitoring vendors now compete against a rival whose index is built from live click volume rather than crawled pages alone.
- The August 2011 Twitterfeed acquisition becomes the ingestion layer for this index, making the deal look less like a feature grab and more like pipeline for the search product.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, URL shorteners consolidate into data businesses where the redirect itself is the asset and search, ranking, and analytics are the paid products — the 2009 question of who pays gets answered by selling attention data rather than news.
The trend: Link-shortening infrastructure is being repurposed into real-time search and brand-analytics platforms, with aggregate click data serving as the underlying index of web attention.