Re:Ask HN: How are url shorteners making money?
by thorax on Monday March 09, 2009 @11:18AM
(#508500)
They can make some money indirectly. As background, we made http://tinyarro.ws.
For our service, we make money indirectly by mentioning our other services/sites as friendly as possible. We've seen stellar response from that.
It helps that our URL shrinker is new/cute/silly and something people like to show-off on Twitter "the shortest URLs on earth".
But our plan isn't to make any money off of the URL shrinking-- it's simply a toy we want to share because it's a really inexpensive project and a good way to promote our other sites.
For our service, we make money indirectly by mentioning our other services/sites as friendly as possible. We've seen stellar response from that.
It helps that our URL shrinker is new/cute/silly and something people like to show-off on Twitter "the shortest URLs on earth".
But our plan isn't to make any money off of the URL shrinking-- it's simply a toy we want to share because it's a really inexpensive project and a good way to promote our other sites.