URL Shorteners: A Case for Vanity
The huge problem with URL shorteners is that the more popular any singular service becomes, the longer the URL becomes and their utility decreases (just look at tinyurl lately).
I had an idea after chatting with Kortina yesterday about Quantcast and Comscore not really counting the ANAMES and even the subdomains for Tumblr correctly (as an aside, I’d be curious to measure how incestuous Tumblr is by comparing the ratio of Dashboard readership vs. pageviews for the subdomains - my guess, the subdomains don’t get much traffic at all and given one needs a login to read the dashboard, those numbers are under reported. Hey David Karp, can I get Google Analytics or a tracking bit on my Dashboard posts?).
I digress. What if you smash the URL shortener business with the domain parking business? You get vanity URL shorteners. Hence, bit.ly or zz.gd or fc.uk or the URL-shortener-dujour becomes an engine for people to push their own custom URL shortener service. The value of say bit.ly isn’t in the shorteneing, but the extremely valuable tracking metrics and popularity insights I’ve discussed previously. By allowing people to park their unused domains for URL shortening, you get:
- Tons of fresh domains to extend the utility of your shortening service without retiring legacy shortened URLs.
- The shortened URL now becomes a branding exercise for the very individuals who use them. Trust, you would instantaneously have scoble.ly, fwilson.gd, wsj.gd, etc. ALL in usage, and gather the metrics and insights. Huge win.
- There is no better way to reward people who find and distribute URLs than the vanity of seeing their name in the URL.
- The branded URLs virality are easily measured visually. I don’t need a login to see who originated tinyurl.com/Sa5Gjk - I can just see gbattle.ly/XXXX and everyone will know it’s from me.
- By establishing yourself as an easily customized platform play in terms of URL shortening and data collection, your site can push the analytics, insights, popularity, newsfeed, timeline and realtime tools as a destination.
- There’s gotta be some cool usages for vanity bookmarklets for the service - more branding opportunities, sponsorship, etc.. In fact, what you can do in the bookmarklet is whole other idea. Intent driven services are a prime opportunity for many activities to happen.
Had to get the initial idea out there. Thoughts?
