Bitly is a

URL shortening URL shortening is a technique on the World Wide Web in which a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) may be made substantially shorter and still direct to the required page. This is achieved by using a redirect which links to the web page that has ...

service and a link management platform. The company Bitly, Inc. was established in 2008. It is privately held and based in New York City. Bitly shortens 600 million links per month, for use in social networking, SMS, and email. Bitly makes money by charging for access to aggregate data created as a result of many people using the shortened URLs. In 2017,

Spectrum Equity Spectrum Equity is an American growth equity firm that invests in businesses related to the information economy. The company operates out of offices in Boston, MA and San Francisco, CA. The company was an early investor in Ancestry.com and Grubhu ...

acquired a majority stake in Bitly for $64 million.

Products

The Bitly URL shortening service became popular on

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

after it became the default

service on the website on May 6, 2009. It was subsequently replaced by Twitter's own

t.co Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

service. The company behind Bitly launched a similar service, but for online videos, to determine what videos are the most popular on the web. The company offers a paid solution called Bitly Enterprise that provides advanced branding features, audience intel, omnichannel campaign tracking and more. Companies can use their own custom domains to generate shortened links; for example, ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

'' uses nyti.ms, and

Pepsi Pepsi is a carbonated soft drink manufactured by PepsiCo. Originally created and developed in 1893 by Caleb Bradham and introduced as Brad's Drink, it was renamed as Pepsi-Cola in 1898, and then shortened to Pepsi in 1961. History Pepsi wa ...

uses pep.si,

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

uses goo.gle. This allows the company to push brand awareness on services such as Twitter but use the Bitly engine to generate the shortened URLs and track marketing metrics. Bitly Enterprise also has advanced analytics features and uses Bitly data to provide advanced social insight tools for companies and brands.

Technology

The company uses

HTTP 301 The HTTP response status code 301 Moved Permanently is used for permanent redirecting, meaning that links or records returning this response should be updated. The new URL should be provided in the Location field, included with the response. The 3 ...

redirects for its links. The shortcuts are intended to be permanent and cannot be changed once they are created. URLs that are shortened with the bitly service use the bit.ly domain or any other generic domain that the service offers. Starting October 12, 2010, users could automatically generate

QR code A QR code (an initialism for quick response code) is a type of matrix barcode (or two-dimensional barcode) invented in 1994 by the Japanese company Denso Wave. A barcode is a machine-readable optical label that can contain information about th ...

s that, when scanned with a mobile QR code reader, automatically directed users to shortened links. On May 29, 2012, Bitly announced "Bitmarks", a new search feature, with enhanced public profiles and an iPhone app.

Preview short URLs

To see a short URL's information, that is to reveal or preview any Bitly URL https://bit.ly/''x'' just append a plus sign "+", as in https://bit.ly/''x''+, for example https://bit.ly/1sNZMwL should be copy and pasted into the browser address bar as https://bit.ly/1sNZMwL+. This allows users to see and check the long URL before visiting it.

Alternative domains

.ly 





.ly is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Libya.
  Registration 
A .ly registration is the process of registering a user domain name within the ccTLD for Libya. The .ly domain, introduced in 1997,

is the country code

top-level domain A top-level domain (TLD) is one of the domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet after the root domain. The top-level domain names are installed in the root zone of the name space. For all domains in ...

(

ccTLD A country code top-level domain (ccTLD) is an Internet top-level domain generally used or reserved for a country, sovereign state, or dependent territory identified with a country code. All ASCII ccTLD identifiers are two letters long, and all ...

) for

Libya Libya (; ar, ليبيا, Lībiyā), officially the State of Libya ( ar, دولة ليبيا, Dawlat Lībiyā), is a country in the Maghreb region in North Africa. It is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, Egypt to the east, Suda ...

. In 2011, the bit.ly address was set to redirect to bitly.com. The .ly TLD is controlled by the Libyan government, which has previously removed one domain deemed incompatible with Muslim law. Bitly users on paid plans can use a custom domain registered separately by the user and redirected to Bitly's servers via the DNS record. Bitly used to offer additional domains: bitly.com and j.mp (using the top-level domain of the

Northern Mariana Islands The Northern Mariana Islands, officially the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI; ch, Sankattan Siha Na Islas Mariånas; cal, Commonwealth Téél Falúw kka Efáng llól Marianas), is an unincorporated territory and commonw ...

, a commonwealth of the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...

). This functionality is no longer available.

References

External links