a tiny idea.
10 June 2007
Surely TinyURL has figured out a way to make money off of its services? Today I was reading a column on the ever-increasing screwiness of the subprime mortgage market, and its jump-page layout, which was in short columns, became extremely awkward when the URL for an article by Elizabeth Warren was inserted in the piece. What about, instead of posting those long, subject-to-bad-copyediting URLs, TinyURL sold a branded version of its services to various media outlets (NYTURL.com would be the obvious choice for the Times, and what do you know, it’s available), and had its generated links serve as Web pointers instead of the often-unruly deeplinks. You wouldn’t need an interstitial page or anything, but there is an added metric bonus: Hosting the links-to-the-links on local servers would give the people who write for the Times a little glimpse into their pieces’ click-through rate, so they can become just as obsesso over Web stats as their Internetty brothers and sisters.