Tr.im says good bye – The end of major URL shorteners?

Tr.im has just announced that they will be discontinuing their URL shortening service. URL’s will continue to work until December 31st this year. After that all shortened URL’s wills top working.

But why has this happened?

What happened?

The impression from tr.im’s homepage and blog post seems to be the following 3 things:

1. No-one wants to buy or invest
2. No-one wants to advertise or see adverts
3. No point in developing the site further

It is pretty conclusive, they are pretty screwed. With the service being popular it was always going to have high costs and no income, which is just a massive spiral that you don’t want to be a part of. They only way they could save themselves would be to get investment, but investors want to know how they will get their money back.

Advertising with short URL services

There are 2 ways that you could do advertising with short URLs. Both of them are intrusive and would most likely push users to another service.

Interstitial
Showing a whole page of advertising for a certain amount of time before redirecting to the target page, this obviously means that the user experience is degraded and with sites like Twitter being a “now” network, who wants to wait 30 seconds before getting to a site they just clicked?

Bar
We all know what has happened with sites that use frames and bars. But what if the bar had a line of Google ads instead of other buttons and info? If it was a small enough ad then I personally wouldn’t care about it. The problem would be getting targeted ads, Google would need to be given info about what the page content is (as its sat in another frame) or using a private ad network.

Custom shortening services

I think these are the way to go. By custom short URL services I mean the way TechCrunch uses tcrn.ch for their short URLs (built on top of awe.sm).  The problem with really popular short URL services are that they aren’t short anymore! Some of them still have a 4+ letter domain name plus 5 letters after. Just look at is.gd or bit.ly they are getting longer. The benefit of a custom short URL  service is the URLs are actually short, you can collect all the stats you like, you can do whatever you like with the URLs. Be it adding advertising, bars/frames or simply collecting details stats. As long as the service does a 301 (or possibly 302) redirect sites like Google and TweetMeme can index sites correctly. So all round there aren’t really any downsides. Obviously this solution is just for businesses, every day users would still need a service to use.

The end of smaller services?

Of course its not the end of URL shortening services. Sites like Bit.ly obviously have the backing from Twitter since they swapped to them from TinyURL for their shortening service of choice. Bit.ly also has a large amount of investment. But what about other services, that are large, but not as large as major shorteners like bit.ly and tinyurl?

My personal opinion is that they will have a tough time staying afloat until they can get investment and make money, and as I have written above, it will be hard for them to find the “correct” way to get money.

I’m really interested in your thoughts so please post your comments below.

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