No, they're not correct. They're bitter. There's a difference. There's a way to monetize everything. They just didn't figure it out. They wanted the quick buyout and it's not 1999 anymore.
tweetamar
· 4 months ago
Tr.im is dead! Long live the Tr.im -> Bit.ly Converters!
Michael Bauser
· 4 months ago
I'm unclear on what you think "Tr.im -> Bit.ly Converters" would look like. The only opitions I see are brower plug-ins or Bit.ly buying Tr.im. The first option is less-than-optimal and the second is highly unlikely.
Dan Brookins
· 4 months ago
Well, companies like tr.im or bit.ly have no barrier to entry, they just do not have any technology. Once can replicate these companies in just a day. So, the demise of tr.im brings a valuable lesson that a startup should have some technology behind it and a business model. I hardly see such companies these days .. Twitter apps can also be innovative like the one I am big fan of -- BoilingPage (http://www.boilingpage.com) that shows the hot things among people, like Hot Webpages, Hot Movies, Hot Music, Hot Games, Hot Books, Hot TV shows and more. Am really looking forward to seeing more like this ..
Anthony Mitchell
· 4 months ago
Tr.im’s primary monetization option is to sell real-time traffic intelligence to advertisers.
In planning for an online ad campaign, it used to be that ad managers could take a leisurely three or four weeks to gradually ramp up, find the right keywords, test ad-text combinations, and increase their spend in a conservative manner.
Now that huge amounts of traffic are coming from social media (over 20% of TechCrunch’s 7 million monthly uniques) and with URL shortners used for a significant amount of that traffic, Tr.im has access to extremely valuable market intelligence. The payoffs for advertisers? Better access to consumers, better ROI, instant results, product placement at strategic moments and the exploitation of unique opportunities.
As someone who does a lot of valuations of online assets, I’d value Tr.im at roughly $4.5 million to $7.5 million.
The challenge with domain-centric asset valuations, particularly where considerable unmonetized traffic volumes are concerned, is that three quarters of the strategic transactions are private. Sometimes we find out about a price a year or more after the transaction, as in the case of Clothes.com, which sold for 4.9 million in 2008 to Zappos but was only disclosed after Zappos was subsequently acquired by Amazon.
A similar sale at a greater valuation came from TrafficZ’s acquisition of NameIntelligence (NI), which runs DomainTools. That acquisition is currently being litigated over representations and warrants – primarily those made by the seller, but the post-litigation valuation is likely to exceed Clothes.com.
Unlike NI, Tr.im owns a big piece of the Internet through the traffic volume they support. Bigger than Kevin Ham and Frank Schilling? If not now, then soon. What makes Tr.im’s volumes important is that it represents hot traffic, trending traffic.
Competitors to Tr.im suffer from weak TLDs/CCs. Anyone care to litigate an intellectual property dispute in Libya? Or better yet, India – which does not follow UDRP and where substantial punitive awards are increasingly commonplace.
Tr.im was the best service of its type, in part because users enjoyed dedicated URLs and because of the statistical tools. It’s too bad they didn’t communicate with their user base about their interest in selling the service before shutting it down.
First-time sellers (like first-time buyers) often don’t know how to work with investment bankers and are reluctant to do so. They don’t understand deal steps or the psychological aspects of strategic transactions and consequently fall victim to self-inflicted pitfalls. Sometimes they stumble by selecting niche-market bankers or by prematurely setting their sights on a short list of preferred buyers or sellers. It’s a movie we’ve seen before. And have just seen again.
Josh
· 4 months ago
What a shame! tr.im have always been my URL shortener of choice, for some reason. Guess I'll have to modify my TweetDeck settings :(
Matthew Lowery
· 4 months ago
It's a huge shame. 1st comment!
Matthew Lowery
· 4 months ago
It's a huge shame. 1st comment darn missed it >:(
DJ
· 4 months ago
so lame.
Matthew Lowery
· 4 months ago
What's your problem? I use tr.im for loads of links, it's a huge shame. But I'll just migrate to bit.ly.
DJ
· 4 months ago
I was referring to your "1st comment"
Matthew Lowery
· 4 months ago
Ah ok. But this is the first article about its closure and I realised I might have had the first comment, thought I might say lol
Steve B ✔
· 4 months ago
"Will users pay for URL shorteners? No, probably not. However, they might pay for the information that URL shorteners possess."
Hmmm, no. Definitely not.
Simarprit Singh
· 4 months ago
Darvin, Darvin, Darvin - Survival of the fittest was bound to happen in the Short URL segment. I expect few more to die. For a short URL service to succeed you need a constant flow of traffic and extremely low costs. Our service http://UURL.in is doing well and growing. We have so far reached here: "347745 Uurls have been created and viewed 1431221 times" We are sure that UURL.in would survive because of its very robust algorithm and extremely low costs. It is amongst the fastest in response and has practically never been down.
Michael Bauser
· 4 months ago
Traffic, schmaffic. Can you monetize it? Probably not.
If you can, feel free to come back and brag about your six-month old website then.
Patrick Sweeney
· 4 months ago
Wow, I can't believe how naive you are. Anyone can throw up a simple URL shortener. There is no money to be had in this space. People will get over the broken links.
M4D1S0N
· 4 months ago
That's a shame :/
natalie
· 4 months ago
I loved tr.im!!! I am sad.
Me
· 4 months ago
Tr.im's blog has a (slightly) more detailed message:
I don't have the answer to monetizing short URLs. Obviously, or I would have sold it to tr.im, which was also my shortener of choice. But what this should open up for discussion is the future of "free use" online. The idea that a business can give away all of its services - bandwidth in this case - and still survive is a very flawed business model. I'm including twitter itself in this. I'm sure investors in twitter are doing so because they want to be "part" of this thing when it begins to make money. What will that be, I wonder? I bet the INVESTORS are wondering, too.
Shitij Nigam
· 4 months ago
Display the redirected links in a manner similar to ow.ly? And display advertisements in the wrapper instead?I mean, Advertisements aren't a completely solid revenue model, but it could be a start. But then again, the popularity of the shortener itself might come into play I guess. Sad really, I must say.
Wyn Galbraith
· 4 months ago
What is really down right dirty about this whole dang thing is that there was no warning. Was using it just a bit ago and refreshed to find that horrible excuse for a message.
THIS IS NOT HOW TO DO BUSINESS other app sites like http://tr.im So WHAT if the links last till the end of the year.
We have no access to them? All that work put into creating a library of shortened links down the toilet.
They were my choice & now I have to move on. I'd rather write my own URL shortener than to trust yet another business that could care less about the users and ONLY care about possible money.
Well here's one ex-fan of http://tr.im saying I HOPE NO ONE OFFERS ANYTHING FOR THAT SERVICE !
Another bump in the online road for the day. Just totally sucks. May the creators get what they deserve NOTHING!
DJ
· 4 months ago
If I was going to be so dependent on a library of shortened links I would have created my own service anyway. This could happen with any free service out there, you can't become so dependent on them.
Chris Clayton
· 4 months ago
Wyn, like the old saying goes, you get what you pay for.
if you dont like it, take your own suggestion and write your own.
Wyn Galbraith
· 4 months ago
I would have paid for the service if it had been reliable. There was not an option to pay. So if you don't like my opinion then too bad. There's a lot of free services out there that are reliable.
tr.im just bailed with sour grapes attitude, I quote complete with misspellings: "...we just can't justify further devleopment since Twitter has all but annointed bit.ly the market winner."
One word comes to mind QUITTERS!
I quote: "There is simply no point for us to continue..." Lame losers.
Oh by the by, creators of http://tr.im there is such a thing called a spell checker. I cannot believe that you placed a badly spelled notice on your website. You know what that says?
Chris Clayton
· 4 months ago
if it wasnt reliable then what are you complaining for? tr.im never put a gun to your head and told you to use their service did they? tr.im never promised that they will be around for 94 years did they?
Sure, if you want to call them quitters then go ahead but don't say crap like "May the creators get what they deserve NOTHING!" - they put alot of energy into the service, they couldn't risk keeping the service alive and then loosing all THEIR money, especially in a time like this.
bandwidth costs money... money they don't have. personally, i would prefer they shut it down than risk their own life by using their own money (the same money they use to buy their dinner tonight, the same money they use to keep a roof over their head)
Oh and by the way, before you criticize their spelling please re-check your comment. I quote, What the heck is "by the by"?
... a loser is someone who doesnt try... they tried harder than you... loser!
thanks for reading... sweet dreams!
Tirminyl
· 4 months ago
I strongly urge that businesses and blogs that rely on short url's, research into providing their own for this very reason. There are a ton of sites and plug-ins that will help for this very reason.
Jonathan Coffman
· 4 months ago
I'm having a hard time finding any white-label, or decent hosted scripts that aren't buggy little php apps.
DJ
· 4 months ago
If you use wordpress, there are plugins for it.
David Kanter
· 4 months ago
just because this one service is down doesn't mean the death of all URL shortners, does it? Also, if someone reads the Terms and Conditions when using them, they probably say something about them not guaranteed to last forever
Michael Bauser
· 4 months ago
Well, DUH. A company whose entire business model was "sell out to Twitter" threw in the towel when it became clear Twitter isn't buying. I'm actually sorta impressed they came to their senses this early, but their whining about Twitter "annointing" bit.ly is silly -- Twitter was already using a competing service (tinyurl.com) when tr.im came along.
The who URL-shortener "industry" is ridiculous, because the function is too easy to duplicate in-house (like Flickr, Brightkite, and Twitpic do). Tinyurl endures because it's (seemingly) committed to not making big money. I expect most of the players in this industry to die soner or later.
Brian Meagher
· 4 months ago
I'm glad Twitter has "all but annointed bit.ly" the market winner. I like the interface and ease of use of bit.ly, and appreciate an accepted "norm" for URL shorteners. Sorry for tr.im tho... for fans of it, I hope some company comes in and scoops it up.
Zachary Collins
· 4 months ago
Have to admit, I knew this was coming with some URL shortener.
Startpoint
· 4 months ago
I'm a bit.ly man myself.
kevinnunez
· 4 months ago
sad, but I always use bit.ly so it wont be a big issue for me
anon
· 4 months ago
another URL shortener out of the competition... nig.gr will be the new bit.ly
That sucks. I used tr.im in Seesmic Desktop since it was the shortest one available. The next shortest in Seesmic Desktop is is.gd, so I guess I'll be using that now for URL shortening.
cbemerine
· 4 months ago
Figured something like this would happen one day, so started copy / pasting all the shortened URLs along with the longer (not shortened) URL, date of article, brief comment for all the links I have been copying. I even save a copy of the article, should the source drop it, I can always host a "cache" copy so my readers will still have access to the content.
That last point is really important if the link was to anything that any corporate entity might find embarrassing to their business model for any reason. What if they got the content deleted and accused you of lying that it was ever there, thus pressuring you to take down any content related to that information. What would be your response to their harassment?
In the case of negative information about a large company that decides to threaten lawsuit? Would you fold, removing the content from your blog (even if you were truthful and they were lying) or post the cache copy and tell them to stuff it?
Obviously if you have a blog, you will want to update any links before they hit the bit bucket.
Akmal Wardak
· 4 months ago
unbelievable. it sounds more like a hacker hacked them and wrote the whole thing on their homepage.
gwoodard
· 4 months ago
How many of us actually search back more than few days to find a tweet for its link? This is no big deal to those using twitter as we think it was intended.
C. Dasent
· 4 months ago
Shaquille O'Neal works his magic once again presenting the world with Mega entertainment! He has lauched a new social network which will put other social networks to shame!
C. Dasent
· 4 months ago
Shaquille O'Neal works his magic once again presenting the world with Mega entertainment! He has lauched a new social network which will put other social networks to shame! http://squidoo.com/shaquillepayerplayer
Paul Wackerow
· 4 months ago
I like what Digg has done with their own shortened links. I would love to see more news sites, blogs and commonly tweeted websites to start hosting their own shortened links, if not by means of a secondary condensed domain at least by means of using their current domain and utilizing the root directory to redirect to their pages (such as mashable.com/aB42g, which is of course a false link at the moment).
This way if a particular site shuts down and dies, the only "broken links" will be there own anyway.
Michael Bauser
· 4 months ago
Hosting shortened links on the core domain is a bad idea; it increased the chances of a namespace collision between the automatically-generated URIs and the non-random URIs.
darlanne
· 4 months ago
I fully agree with this. I recently started using a WP plugin that provides friendly short links to use on Twitter, that way if any URL service shuts down, my own links are still in tact. I use Bit.ly for linking news stories etc so yes the burden is on each site owner to provide their own solution. That is, I believe, the best approach to ensure link life. Sorry to hear of Tr.im. I admit it's the best branded name out of most of them and seemed to have many features. I'd imagine somebody would want to save it.
BrakeItUp
· 4 months ago
Nobody's noticed the problem of infinite loops with url shorteners? http://uurl.in/yanarp
craigmcgill
· 4 months ago
Article states: "There is just too much value in those links for there to be no bidders." But is there? There is only value for the people going to the link. It's not as if extra advertising can be added in to justify the short URL. Perhaps the problem has been making the URLs free to start with...
Stajo
· 4 months ago
I used trim. Good service.
r0cketman22
· 4 months ago
bit.ly was a better service.
tr.im was a better name.
OnSeeker
· 4 months ago
Probably the case is that someone is going to buy them! But still we need to be protected against Spam and phishing attacks so we need a good filter for those! I recommend BitDefender because it has an excellent detection rate on known and unknown malware!
Chris Murray
· 4 months ago
This is a shame, but I have never agreed with URL shortening. Despite undermining good work to make URLS more readable and accessible they are a perfect breeding ground for spam, virus's, phishing etc etc.
ps. Use free services knowing that they could shut down at any time. Nothing is forever! ;0)
Snake
· 4 months ago
ffffffffffff
I love(d) tr.im. Bit.ly just isn't the same. :(
However, their goodbye message sounds a lot like, "I'm taking my legos and going home." I hope someone makes sure all the tr.im links keep going where they should.
Sha
· 4 months ago
It's so sad to hear that tr.im is closing down. It's the only URL shortening service I use. Being a designer myself, I liked the user interface and found it to be both eye-catching and user-friendly. IMHO it's far far better than what bit.ly has to offer. Plus, it's one character short in length!!! I hope some reputable company buys it soon.
Steave
· 4 months ago
Shaquille O'Neal works his magic once again presenting the world with Mega entertainment! He has lauched a new social network which will put other social networks to shame!.
Brands-and-Jingles
· 4 months ago
A propos, shortenings: Jimmi Choo chose Cyrillic two letters чу.com.
The current trend is to have a proprietary one - the shorter the better.
I completely agree with you .. that's very true ....
anonymous
· 4 months ago
Survival of the fittest was bound to happen in the Short URL segment. I expect few more to die. For a short URL service to succeed you need a constant flow of traffic and extremely low costs.
Alexandar Tzanov
· 4 months ago
Interesting reasoning for going out of business. Personally I think that URL shorners are useful, but only in some cases. There are too many public ones, which is nice, but it can create confusions and , like in this case, uncertainty for uses who have relied heavily on the service.
I see more value in such services when they are build into/ part of a website whose business is not URL shortening. Some examples are the NY Times, Stumble Upon and TechCrunch.
I believe it should be "from TinyURL to Bit.ly", not the other way around. TinyURL was the first!
Premium wordpress themes
· 4 months ago
That's bad. I started using it few months back.
kennedy
· 4 months ago
What if bit.ly or TinyUrl buys/merges their stuff together so they have a larger mass of URLS?? this way all links are not dead, and whoever buys it will increase their user counts
Xavier
· 4 months ago
Twitter should provide is own url shortener. That would be great.
henrik
· 3 months ago
probably not the first one to ask: but why isn't url shortening integrated in the twitter format itself, i.e. full urls visually shortened?
Rick
· 2 months ago
Its sad to see trim go :( I found this new URL shortener that allows the user to shorten multiple urls at a time and some other unique features. its the only one i use right now. http://myurlz.com
All Comments
In planning for an online ad campaign, it used to be that ad managers could take a leisurely three or four weeks to gradually ramp up, find the right keywords, test ad-text combinations, and increase their spend in a conservative manner.
Now that huge amounts of traffic are coming from social media (over 20% of TechCrunch’s 7 million monthly uniques) and with URL shortners used for a significant amount of that traffic, Tr.im has access to extremely valuable market intelligence. The payoffs for advertisers? Better access to consumers, better ROI, instant results, product placement at strategic moments and the exploitation of unique opportunities.
As someone who does a lot of valuations of online assets, I’d value Tr.im at roughly $4.5 million to $7.5 million.
The challenge with domain-centric asset valuations, particularly where considerable unmonetized traffic volumes are concerned, is that three quarters of the strategic transactions are private. Sometimes we find out about a price a year or more after the transaction, as in the case of Clothes.com, which sold for 4.9 million in 2008 to Zappos but was only disclosed after Zappos was subsequently acquired by Amazon.
A similar sale at a greater valuation came from TrafficZ’s acquisition of NameIntelligence (NI), which runs DomainTools. That acquisition is currently being litigated over representations and warrants – primarily those made by the seller, but the post-litigation valuation is likely to exceed Clothes.com.
Unlike NI, Tr.im owns a big piece of the Internet through the traffic volume they support. Bigger than Kevin Ham and Frank Schilling? If not now, then soon. What makes Tr.im’s volumes important is that it represents hot traffic, trending traffic.
Competitors to Tr.im suffer from weak TLDs/CCs. Anyone care to litigate an intellectual property dispute in Libya? Or better yet, India – which does not follow UDRP and where substantial punitive awards are increasingly commonplace.
Tr.im was the best service of its type, in part because users enjoyed dedicated URLs and because of the statistical tools. It’s too bad they didn’t communicate with their user base about their interest in selling the service before shutting it down.
First-time sellers (like first-time buyers) often don’t know how to work with investment bankers and are reluctant to do so. They don’t understand deal steps or the psychological aspects of strategic transactions and consequently fall victim to self-inflicted pitfalls. Sometimes they stumble by selecting niche-market bankers or by prematurely setting their sights on a short list of preferred buyers or sellers. It’s a movie we’ve seen before. And have just seen again.
1st comment!
1st comment
darn missed it >:(
Hmmm, no. Definitely not.
If you can, feel free to come back and brag about your six-month old website then.
http://blog.tr.im/post/159369789/tr-im-r-i-p
But then again, the popularity of the shortener itself might come into play I guess.
Sad really, I must say.
THIS IS NOT HOW TO DO BUSINESS other app sites like http://tr.im So WHAT if the links last till the end of the year.
We have no access to them? All that work put into creating a library of shortened links down the toilet.
They were my choice & now I have to move on. I'd rather write my own URL shortener than to trust yet another business that could care less about the users and ONLY care about possible money.
Well here's one ex-fan of http://tr.im saying I HOPE NO ONE OFFERS ANYTHING FOR THAT SERVICE !
Another bump in the online road for the day. Just totally sucks. May the creators get what they deserve NOTHING!
if you dont like it, take your own suggestion and write your own.
tr.im just bailed with sour grapes attitude, I quote complete with misspellings: "...we just can't justify further devleopment since Twitter has all but annointed bit.ly the market winner."
One word comes to mind QUITTERS!
I quote: "There is simply no point for us to continue..." Lame losers.
Oh by the by, creators of http://tr.im there is such a thing called a spell checker. I cannot believe that you placed a badly spelled notice on your website. You know what that says?
Sure, if you want to call them quitters then go ahead but don't say crap like "May the creators get what they deserve NOTHING!" - they put alot of energy into the service, they couldn't risk keeping the service alive and then loosing all THEIR money, especially in a time like this.
bandwidth costs money... money they don't have. personally, i would prefer they shut it down than risk their own life by using their own money (the same money they use to buy their dinner tonight, the same money they use to keep a roof over their head)
Oh and by the way, before you criticize their spelling please re-check your comment.
I quote, What the heck is "by the by"?
... a loser is someone who doesnt try... they tried harder than you... loser!
thanks for reading... sweet dreams!
scripts that aren't buggy little php apps.
The who URL-shortener "industry" is ridiculous, because the function is too easy to duplicate in-house (like Flickr, Brightkite, and Twitpic do). Tinyurl endures because it's (seemingly) committed to not making big money. I expect most of the players in this industry to die soner or later.
http://mavrev.com/site/story/the_begining_of_th...
http://www.adgirlandtechnerd.com
http://www.adgirlandtechnerd.com
http://www.adgirlandtechnerd.com
That last point is really important if the link was to anything that any corporate entity might find embarrassing to their business model for any reason. What if they got the content deleted and accused you of lying that it was ever there, thus pressuring you to take down any content related to that information. What would be your response to their harassment?
In the case of negative information about a large company that decides to threaten lawsuit? Would you fold, removing the content from your blog (even if you were truthful and they were lying) or post the cache copy and tell them to stuff it?
Obviously if you have a blog, you will want to update any links before they hit the bit bucket.
http://squidoo.com/shaquillepayerplayer
This way if a particular site shuts down and dies, the only "broken links" will be there own anyway.
http://uurl.in/yanarp
tr.im was a better name.
ps. Use free services knowing that they could shut down at any time. Nothing is forever! ;0)
I love(d) tr.im. Bit.ly just isn't the same. :(
However, their goodbye message sounds a lot like, "I'm taking my legos and going home." I hope someone makes sure all the tr.im links keep going where they should.
The current trend is to have a proprietary one - the shorter the better.
Read some research on the domain length in the white paper: http://Brands-and-Jingles.com/white-papers/2009...
I see more value in such services when they are build into/ part of a website whose business is not URL shortening. Some examples are the NY Times, Stumble Upon and TechCrunch.
http://thetitan.titanfusion.net/archive/2009/04...