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A comment on Ask HN: How are url shorteners making money?.

Re:Ask HN: How are url shorteners making money? by mikeyur on Monday March 09, 2009 @04:43AM (#508149)
They don't. To be honest the majority of url shorteners don't make any money at all. I know because I run one. http://urli.ca

It costs me nothing to run because it uses next to no resources on a server that I already pay for and I got the domain for free.

//Sidenote, if anyone is interested in using the service, we have a really simple api (as all the services do) http://urli.ca/api note: the urls auto-increment (ie. ab/ac/ad/ etc.)

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Re:Ask HN: How are url shorteners making money? by benhoyt on Monday March 09, 2009 @02:24PM (#508787)
I run DecentURL.com, and have had basically the same experience. I made a few dollars off some "$7 premium services" for a while, but recently stopped running those as there just wasn't enough demand. Not that I made "selling" DecentURL a priority -- so I shouldn't say too much.

I'm turned off the ads-during-the-redirect thing, but I can see where it might be an effective money-maker.

I like what cli.gs is doing.

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