Why investing in bit.ly last week was a bad idea
aaronpigeon.com
Why investing in bit.ly last week was a bad idea
1–10 of 35 posts
Re: Why investing in bit.ly last week was a bad idea
#2The author didn't really elaborate on what makes this really troubling: the tens (hundreds?) of millions of existing shortlinks out there in the wild right now that would be worthless (or worse, directed to spam or abusive sites). Generally, it's bad, but maybe not the end of the world if a startup loses their domain. But this seems like it would be an unmitigated disaster for a service like bit.ly. I hope they're aggressively working on some kind of strategy to get away from that domain name ASAP.
And this, kids, is yet another example of why URL shortening services should be avoided. They've single-handedly put ability to break the functionality of a growing chunk of the internet into the hands of one demonstrably unstable dictator in a developing nation.
Re: Why investing in bit.ly last week was a bad idea
#3It's potentially extremely dangerous for bit.ly.
Most other foo.ly startups can happily rename themselves fooly.com, but for bit.ly, there are so many existing links out there, and shortness is so important, that the transition would be much more painful.
That being said, no serious investor would have put $10M on bit.ly just because it's 5 characters long. The analytics or something else is where the value is, and that doesn't depend on the domain name being in Lybia.
Re: Why investing in bit.ly last week was a bad idea
#4I wonder if, even if Libya were a stable country with no reason to cause worry, if it would still be a bad idea to invest $10 million into such a simple product.
Unless there's a long term plan, I don't see where the monetization of this service can come from. I always thought after the last dot-com bust, we'd be sensitive and conservative in respect to questions of profitability and revenue, but this investment in bit.ly gave me a bit of a sense of deja-vu, and it wasn't a good feeling.
Re: Why investing in bit.ly last week was a bad idea
#5What's the point in putting domain names under the control of a country these days anyway? I understand that Lybia or some organization therein collects a fee from people registering .ly domains, but it would certainly be possible to still pay them the fee without giving them the power to "turn off" domain names without cause. They could even retain the right to refuse to sell domains to people, but once you've bought the domain it needs to be yours in perpetuity, as it is with other property. This is a completely artificial problem based on archaic rules that has a straightforward solution.
Re: Why investing in bit.ly last week was a bad idea
#6The author didn't really elaborate on what makes this really troubling: the tens (hundreds?) of millions of existing shortlinks out there in the wild right now that would be worthless (or worse, directed to spam or abusive sites). Generally, it's bad, but maybe not the end of the world if a startup loses their domain. But this seems like it would be an unmitigated disaster for a service like bit.ly. I hope they're ag…
Luckily all bit.ly links are the sane for j.mp. Telling people to change them will be harder though.
Re: Why investing in bit.ly last week was a bad idea
#7I remember reading that nic.ly or their agents made some effort to contact vb.ly's owners to discuss their concerns with vb.ly, but received no response. The author attempts to paint nic.ly et al as being capricious, but it seems to me there were some attempts made to resolve this amicably.
Re: Why investing in bit.ly last week was a bad idea
#8The author didn't really elaborate on what makes this really troubling: the tens (hundreds?) of millions of existing shortlinks out there in the wild right now that would be worthless (or worse, directed to spam or abusive sites). Generally, it's bad, but maybe not the end of the world if a startup loses their domain. But this seems like it would be an unmitigated disaster for a service like bit.ly. I hope they're ag…
bit.ly have been running j.mp for quite a while - I've used that instead of bit.ly whenever I needed a short URL with statistics tracking.
Re: Why investing in bit.ly last week was a bad idea
#9I wonder if, even if Libya were a stable country with no reason to cause worry, if it would still be a bad idea to invest $10 million into such a simple product. Unless there's a long term plan, I don't see where the monetization of this service can come from. I always thought after the last dot-com bust, we'd be sensitive and conservative in respect to questions of profitability and revenue, but this investment in b…
I think a common misconception is thinking that bit.ly is in the business of shortening URLs when in reality they're in the analytics business of tracking when, where and how often people use and share links.
As to monetization, they already have a $1000/month enterprise level plan that gives you tons of analytics and that runs lots of the custom branded URL shorteners (4sq.com, yhoo.it, pep.si, cs.pn).
If I were a bit.ly investor my number one concern would be Google linking up their goog.gl shortener with Google Analytics. Doing so would punch a huge hole in Bitly's value proposition.
Re: Why investing in bit.ly last week was a bad idea
#10The author didn't really elaborate on what makes this really troubling: the tens (hundreds?) of millions of existing shortlinks out there in the wild right now that would be worthless (or worse, directed to spam or abusive sites). Generally, it's bad, but maybe not the end of the world if a startup loses their domain. But this seems like it would be an unmitigated disaster for a service like bit.ly. I hope they're ag…
Luckily all bit.ly links are the sane for j.mp. Telling people to change them will be harder though.
Yeah, the difficult part is changing all those links all over the web; after all, bit.ly still has the metadata and could setup a new domain for it in a few hours. The problem is getting hundreds of thousands (or millions) of sites to change all those links. And what's worse is that Libya wouldn't even have to break the functionality; they could just introduce spam, ads, phishing, malware, etc. along the way. Bit.ly has effectively put billions of intentional clicks in the hands of the exact wrong person.
The right way to fix this if it all goes to shit would probably be at the DNS or browser level. At least then you have fewer people that you have to convince to change.