Short Url Services

[vatsia]

Hello,
i saw today a lot of sites offering short urls to replace long affiliate or ebay urls.You simply visit those sites, enter your long url and get a short one like this shorturl.com/123.

I am just courious how those sites make money.Most of them don't even require a registration and offer this for free.

Is this not a risk to get sued if you have downtime and the redirections don't work?

[r2d2]

The only one I know of (tinyurl.com) had Yahoo ads on it - thats how they make money.

If you're running your own website I would think it would be best to do it yourself, or not bother. I don't think it matters if online links are long - only ones offline etc that need to be typed in.

Also, I'm sure they would have something in their T&Cs that would say they take no responsibility for the link always working, to avoid chance of legal action.

[Chris]

These sites actually used to be much more popular. Back in the day when hosting was more expensive people would use free hosts without their own domain and then would get such URLs instead.

Nowadays though with hosting and domains being so cheap, I can't really see why anyone would use one for a professional site.

[mails]

You can have your own redirects too....

[vatsia]

I know, but I was thinking to offer this to replace long affiliate or ebay links.

[James]

These sites usually make money by just ads on the main website, where people GET the short URL. And from ads on their 404 error pages, etc.
If you feel like being an arse then you could always make the page framed, with an ad up top.