Bitly readies real-time viral search engine, raises $20 million in new funding
Bitly, a New York company that lets users shorten, share, and track URLs, is raising around $20 million in a new round of funding, we have learned from multiple sources. That's twice the amount the company raised …
Context & Ripple Effects
Bitly's product history has been a long attempt to monetize the clickstream behind its URL shortener: a paid news service experiment back in 2009 that paidContent doubted anyone would buy, a $10 million Series B in October 2010 while growth was still steep, and the Twitterfeed acquisition in August 2011 to sit closer to where links get pushed out. Its own enterprise blog argued the case for social search last October — this new product is that argument turned into a shipped bet.
What changed with this report: multiple sources tell The Verge Bitly is raising around $20 million — twice its 2010 round, though still unconfirmed by the company — specifically to build a real-time viral search engine on top of the click data only a shortener at its scale accumulates. The pickup across VentureBeat, TechCrunch, Betabeat and the Guardian within a day shows how much interest attaches to whether the shortener can become an attention index.
First-order effects
- Bitly enters the real-time search market directly, competing for the same 'what's spiking right now' query traffic that newsrooms and marketers currently satisfy through other discovery tools.
- The reported $20 million round, if it closes at that size, gives Bitly roughly double the capital of its 2010 raise to fund engineering and sales headcount for the enterprise side of the product.
Second-order effects
- Publishers and agencies tracking viral spread gain a rival data source for timing coverage and ad buys, pressuring existing real-time analytics vendors to justify their prices against a free-at-the-point-of-sharing dataset.
- Other link-infrastructure players face pressure to treat their accumulated click data as a sellable ranking product rather than a byproduct, since Bitly is demonstrating the conversion is fundable.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, link shortening consolidates from a utility into an attention-measurement business, with the durable asset being proprietary clickstream data rather than the redirect service itself.
- Real-time ranking of web attention becomes a contested layer between social platforms and traditional search engines — and whoever owns the click data sits closest to measuring what users actually chose, a position regulators may eventually scrutinize as these datasets grow.
The trend: URL shorteners are repositioning from redirect utilities into attention-data companies, converting accumulated clickstreams into real-time search and ranking products.