Tuesday, July 7, 2009

The high margin deliverable is the spreadsheet (analytics)

It's true for Google, Amazon, RRDC, CGX, XRX, EK and anyone else in the "media" business. It's what you can learn from the network. Not what you can tell the network.

Here's the money sentence:
He's employed contractors, but with the new funding, he expects to hire full-time programmers and improve his computing infrastructure. Also coming is analytics. 'We will be offering that sometime here soon,' Gilbertson said."
And some background for context:
from CNET
URL shortening is hot--but look before you leap

Growing like weeds
URL-shortening services are abundant and becoming more so. They're usually designed with a priority on minimum character length, not easy reading: Is.gd, Bit.ly, Twurl.nl, Tr.im, Sn.im", Cligs, and TinyURL.

If you want to see dozens more, Mashable has a long list.

And the traffic they handle is large. On a typical day right now, Bit.ly is used to create 5 million to 7 million shortened URLs each day, and it handles 25 million requests to expand them--and the growth rate is at a breakneck 5 percent to 15 percent week over week, the company said. Snipurl has delivered 53 billion since its inception. And TinyURL has a database of 293 million URLs.

: "So what's new now? First, Twitter, and second, shortening URLs is becoming an actual business--notably at present through the addition of 'analytics' features that can let those who use the service see data about how many people clicked on links, when, where they're located, and the Web page where they found the shortened link.

TinyURL's funding today primarily comes from advertising on its Web page, but that's changing, said founder Kevin Gilbertson. 'I'm working on something else that should increase that (revenue) quite a bit,' Gilbertson said. He declined to share details at this stage beyond saying, 'It will not change any functionality.'

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