How hard is it to develop a Link shortening service on your own, and how would it benefit my website?
I'm building out a new web platform, and have been using bit.ly for all of my link shortening. It works fairly well, but the analytics and data that comes from their website is absolutely awful.
I was wondering if it's difficult to create my own, and what benefits I might see from going through the development trouble to get it done?
Here are some screenshots from the fairly benign statistics from bit.ly.
Answers ( 1 )
Most private citizens can get by pretty well on Bit.ly and similar services to make their links shorter an/or prettier. But if you are running a startup that relies on link sharing for any part of your revenue or marketing strategy, it makes sense to build your own shortening gadget. There are a number of reasons to make this choice:
1) It's easy and cheap to build your own.
2) The data you collect will be more reliable and won't be shared with third parties
3) More flexible and granular analytics
4) All data has an inherent cash value, either buying or selling. It adds to your startup's capitalization potential to provide this service this on your own from day one, since all the data collected will be your own.
5) While Bit.ly isn't looking like it's going out of business anytime soon, if anything does happen*, your links could be lost. Rolling your own link shortener is like apocalypse insurance for the strange times we're living in.
*lots of people don't know that the .ly TLD in "Bit.ly" "belongs" to the nation of Libya, which is not super stable at the moment, and has been hacked at the registration site level in the past. .ly domains are expected to comport with Libyan law, in theory.