Stats: Bit.ly Surpasses TinyURL in Traffic

Short URL services are a key part of the infrastructure that powers the Age of the Stream. Think of them like railroad tracks. 

TinyURL was king for awhile. But then Twitter ditched it for Bit.ly back in May. Just how much impact did this switch have? A big one.

Traffic stats are only one way to measure the reach of such services. Link shrinking technology is built into the Twitter UI as well as the giant ecosystem of apps that power users interact with. So, in some ways, the total reach of TinyURL and Bit.ly sites are actually meaningless since the figures are significantly lower than they are actually used. 

Still, what's unmistakable is that Bit.ly is rocking TinyURLs world thanks to the switch.

For more, see the images below, which where pulled from Compete.com and Google Trends.

See the full gallery on posterous

Comments

[td]

I wonder how much s4ve.as is contributing to their numbers.

[charly omer]

such a traffic in 1 year for bit.ly, very impressive. Also great to see tinyurl has no "dramatic" traffic drop.(beta comment)

[venkat]

Bit.ly achieved this because of it being a default URL shortener for twitter .

[Jonathan]

If twitter switched in May, bit.ly was experiencing strong growth prior to the switch

[Stone Cold Digital]

I must admit, I use bit.ly because it's the easiest tool with which to filter out bots in your stats...

[The Aion Guy =P]

Bit.ly built in with Seesmic, how can I not use it + the ability to see additional statistics? Bit.ly is just too aswesome not to use it.

[Allan Schoenberg]

I think it's simply due to ease of use and the metrics it provides. I want to see what happens to my links and they serve it up in an easy format.

[loradoe]

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