How link shortening service Bitly expects to double its revenue to $20 million this year
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Historically, it was used by Twitter users to free up more room for words in the 140 character limit. By 2011, it was shortening millions of links a month. However, there was a problem with the free product: it was not making money. Since then it has expanded to become a subscription service for marketers and publishers to track data on their content as it is shared across the internet.
In 2012, revenue was sitting at about $3 million, before hitting $4.1 million in 2013, $7.2 million in 2014, and $12 million in 2015 - the first year the company reached profitability. Showing no signs of slowing, it has predicted itself a revenue run rate of $20 million in 2016.
So how did Bitly do it?
Business Insider spoke to Bitly CEO Mark Josephson about the New York company's quick growth. It grew from having just two sales people, no marketing team and only one person working on the paid product in the fall of 2013, to its current 85-man strong link business.
Josephson said: "I just want to people to understand that we are a ... massive software business. We have massive scale. We'll do 20 billion clicks this month with 5 to 6 billion uniques, truly globally. And we've got the biggest and best marketers in the world using our platform every single day and they go for it because they see that value underneath the hood."
What does Bitly actually do?
Bitly generates 100% of its revenue from more than 1,000 users of its subscription service Bitly Enterprise.
Marketers and publishers use the many products in the service to shorten links, change the URLs to their brand names, create continuity between links across various devices, and to gather analytics on these links to measure their success.
Asked when he expects Bitly's revenue growth to slow, Josephson replied: "Never."