Ask HN: How are url shorteners making money?

Re:Ask HN: How are url shorteners making money? by markat2 on Monday March 09, 2009 @05:12AM (#508166)

It would seem that, for isntance. tinyurl.com has ads on the homepage. The service probably costs close to $0 to run so any upside is profit.

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Re:Ask HN: How are url shorteners making money? by gaius on Monday March 09, 2009 @05:58AM (#508196)

How? It may need little CPU or bandwidth, but at the end of the day it's hardware, it needs to be somewhere, be powered and cooled, etc etc. The cost may be low enough to be paid by the owner personally, but it's not going to be $0.

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Re:Ask HN: How are url shorteners making money? by redrobot5050 on Monday March 09, 2009 @11:33AM (#508520)

It could be free if it was written on AppEngine, and it stayed within the "free" quota.

(For the record I know TinyURL.com was not, but i'm pointing out that a newer/similar service could be.)

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Re:Ask HN: How are url shorteners making money? by m_eiman on Monday March 09, 2009 @07:16AM (#508241)

Like someone else said, the load is low enough to run on dirt cheap shared hosting like Dreamhost. So even if the cost isn't zero, it's less than what most people spend on snacks.

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Re:Ask HN: How are url shorteners making money? by mikeyur on Monday March 09, 2009 @07:01AM (#508229)

It costs a bit more than $0. So many people use the service, every long url on twitter is automatically shortened with the service. I think they have at least a single dedicated server, if not more.

So definitely not $0, perhaps a couple hundred bucks which is made up with google ads.

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