A way to make money off of shortened URLs?
There’s not a whole lot of money in shortening links. Go Daddy has devised a way to change that.
The company filed a trio of patent applications (here’s one) for methods of monetizing shortened URLs. The applications were filed in April 2010 and just published today.
The idea is to monetize each visitor to a shortened URL with some sort of advertising. The method parses the URL that was shortened to come up with relevant keywords and then serve ads related to that. Ads could be served in a number of ways, such as a contextually relevant pop-up that is delivered alongside the target URL when someone clicks on the shortened URL.
I’m not sure if this is what’s intended, but this might also be a good way to monetize a URL shortening interface, such as GoDaddy’s x.co: after someone enters the URL they want to shorten you could show targeted ads to them next to the shortened URL.
James Bladel, Director of Policy Planning at GoDaddy.com, is listed as the inventor.
Mike Maddaloni - @thehotiron says
This sums up what is wrong with patent law on software!
Who hasn’t thought up something like this? Who hasn’t maybe even built something like this? Who has piles of cash to patent every fleeting thought that comes out of their brains with no real intent on making oodles of money, rather preventing others from doing so.
mp/m
Greg says
Totally agree Mike. Once again the law being used to stifle instead of promote innovation.
jp says
It’s just plain annoying when someone has enough money to keep making patents for stuff without even having to make the item or technology.
Dave says
I did something like this a while back. When a URL was shortened, I stored the meta keywords/description & a snippet of text from the remote site in the database. I then used this to return relevant ads in a top frame when the sirt URL was visited.
Result was CTR very low and the ads didn’t seem to be related!
Mike Maddaloni - @thehotiron says
Congrats to GoDaddy for doing their legal diligence – I saw hits on my blog based on the link to it in the comment I posted which took them to my business site as well.
Maybe they looked at my account and are wondering why I have just about moved all of my domain names from them?
Dave’s comments on ads being related or relevant is not surprising as ads appear on Web pages based more and more on YOU and where you surf than the context of the content.
mp/m