Shortened URLs Revisited (and a Twitter Revenue Model)

I've been spending more time on Twitter lately and have been using the is.gd URL shortening service a lot. It is one of hundreds of URL shortening services and I have no idea why I chose that one in particular. But this reminded me that back in January 2008 I wrote a post asking why Google doesn't have their own URL shortening service. Here, I revisit that idea, as well as what a Twitter version might look like. Along the way, I found a revenue model for Twitter. You are most welcome.

The way it works today, one URL could have millions of variants from various URL shortening services. Twitter should expand and contract all shortened URLs sent through their system. Upon expansion, they could see if the URL already has a shortened version and use that same shortened URL. By doing this, they end up building much better metrics around one URL. URLs sent via Twitter that are not shortened could get shortened in the same way.

Now, the monetization scheme for Twitter. For free users, all URLs they send would be framed with a contextual banner ad like owl.ly does. Additionally, in a somewhat controversial move, they could also not do a proper redirect plus add a "nofollow" on links sent by free users. This would potentially eliminate Twitter as a way to spam search engines with link bait.

UPDATE: Turns out Twitter already applies "nofollow" to its links. So I was late to the game on that controversy (happened about 1 year ago). But, it seems that people would like to have that turned off, and they might be willing to pay for it.

If you want to tweet short URLs that are SEO friendly, do not have an ad frame, include a proper redirect and have the nofollow removed, you could pay Twitter. Spammers might still use Twitter, but at least they'd be paying for it and keeping it free for the regular users.

This is better than trying to charge based on number of followers or even the followers/following ratio. Although I think that people on Twitter with a skewed f/f ratio don't use the service right, that becomes a slippery slope as you start to limit the usage of the platform. Instead of limiting usage by differentiating subscription tiers on usage metrics, find something that encourages use and a better experience and charge for that. In fact, I just wrote a quick post on the Sixteen Ventures blog about SaaS Revenue Models and Tiered Pricing Strategy that talks about this.

Frankly by leveraging more control over the URLs, Twitter gets a lot of power back and has a way of making money without charging the average user. Spammers aren't the only users that might pay for these features. Legit business users that like the link love and want a cleaner look than the ad frame overlay would gladly pay for this.

Now, those are my thoughts for Twitter, but when it comes to URL shortening, I believe that Google should just create a shortened URL for every page and kill the shortening services. They could create an API for developers and could integrate it with toolbar, WebMaster toolkit, Blogger, etc.

Twitter could even use Google's URL Shortening service. Upon expansion of a pre-shortened URL, or if they get one that isn't shortened, Twitter could just hit the Google API for the given URL and grab the Google URL (gurl?). This way Google does the heavy lifting and continues to own the internet. Twitter remains a communications channel... I think this might mess with the monetization strategy for Twitter from above though. Oh well... its a start. Now discuss...