urlShort Growth

urlShort has seen some amazing growth just in the first half of this year. We've gone from just over 7,000 unique users to over 84,000! (compete.com)Not only have we seen almost a 1,200% growth rate in our visitors, but we've also grown from just 200,000 redirects per month to over 5,000,000 for a growth rate of over 2,500% from over 1,426,320 URLs. It's simply mind blowing to me to see that kind of usage come from something that I started just to mess around with. As it's progressed it's seen a complete rehaul and has been released as an open source project.

I've had a few people contact me with questions about how I grew urlShort so quickly (it's only been a year), and to be quite honest, I didn't really do much. The first step to getting urlShort used by more than just myself and some friends, was to release an API for creating URLs. That happened in August last year, and resulted in urlShort being added to the popular Twitterfeed application that feeds RSS to Twitter. Since then urlShort has been added in some other applications (although I'm not familiar with most) and with our most recent API additions (the ability to lookup a full URL with the shortened one), short URLs generated by urlShort can be expanded in applications like PowerTwitter and using scripts such as Long URL Please.

The real key to gaining users in the URL shortening space is quite obviously Twitter. Not only is it the only place where they are really needed (although it'd be nice if that would change), but it is also the entire ecosystem surrounding Twitter that fosters adoption and growth of new services. urlShort has a very very small amount of the "market" of URL shorteners, but I still think handling over five million URLs per month is a staggering amount of traffic. But, then again mavrev.com used to get 200 visitors a month not even a year and a half ago.

Thanks for using urlShort. We love you guys.
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