I’ve been trying on URL shortening services for the past year. The usual story has been: looks good, tell a friend, gets popular, and doesn’t scale. The end.
Bit.ly has just been getting better.
There’s an obfuscation argument to be made about URL shorteners. Yes, they’re hiding information behind their tiny URLs. Yes, meaning is lost, but there’s also fascinating data to be grabbed.
What you’re looking at URLs I shortened and published via Twitter for a two and a half week period in May/June. The yellow line represents the number of followers I have, the blue line represents how many folks clicked on my specific shortened link, and the green bar is total clicks on that link regardless of who shortened it.
While 2.5 weeks of data is statistically miniscule, what you’re seeing is roughly a 14% click-thru rate for the URLs that I shortened. You can argue that is artificially high because the shortened URL is obfuscated — you don’t actually know what content is behind the URL is until you’ve clicked on it — but in a world where 2% click-thru rates are pretty sweet, this is intriguing number.
I’m wondering what other folks are seeing…
