Should investors be gambling their investment dollars on fast-growing, but revenue-free startups?
If the recent $2 million investment into Betaworks' in-house project bit.ly is any indication, maybe. Bit.ly is like some of Vancouver's very own url-shorteners, like Invoke Media's ow.ly (related to Hootsuite) and tr.im, all of which do the same thing. They take a convoluted Web address and make it shorter. Great! But as Peter Kafka points out in this post, where is the money?
Kafka says many of bit.ly's competitors like tinyurl generate revenue by running Google ads. But bit.ly won't sell ads and it's free to users. As well,
...it plans on distinguishing itself by tracking all the clicks and streams that come through the service and using the data to provide interesting analytics and insights into who’s looking at what on the Web, in real time.
Bit.ly's people also say that:
...revenue will come sometime down the road, from something else–when they figure out what that is.
So, what are investors really investing in? Kafka says it's the possibilities of Twitter’s real-time search capabilities. What do you think?
HootSuite helps organizations use the social web to launch marketing campaigns, identify and grow audience, and distribute targeted messages across... [more]
Ow.ly is a URL shortener and sharing tool. The ow.ly toolbar allows users to instantly share or retweet links. HootSuite users can track the... [more]
tr.im is an established URL shortening service that prepares great-looking short URLs for services like Twitter. If you send URLs out on Twitter,... [more]
Victoria Revay
Like many, freelance journalist, Victoria Revay is ambitious and adventurous by nature. Since leaving television news, Victoria has worked for Nowpublic.com, she has been published in Western Living Magazine, Blackbook Magazine’s Jet Set Travel Guide, Western Living Condo and Travelmuse.com, and she’s hosted an online entertainment show. She...[more]
