Bitly is a URL shortening service and a link management platform. The company Bitly, Inc. was established in 2008. It is

privately held A privately held company (or simply a private company) is a company whose Stock, shares and related rights or obligations are not offered for public subscription or publicly negotiated in their respective listed markets. Instead, the Private equi ...

and based in New York City. Bitly shortens 600 million links per month, for use in social networking, SMS, and email. Bitly makes money by charging for access to aggregate data created as a result of many people using the shortened URLs. In 2017, Spectrum Equity acquired a majority stake in Bitly for $64 million. From November 2023, short links cannot be created anymore by guest users, requiring users to create an account.

Products

The Bitly URL shortening service became popular on

Twitter Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...

after it became the default URL shortening service on the website on May 6, 2009. It was subsequently replaced by Twitter's own t.co service. The

company A company, abbreviated as co., is a Legal personality, legal entity representing an association of legal people, whether Natural person, natural, Juridical person, juridical or a mixture of both, with a specific objective. Company members ...

behind Bitly launched a similar service, but for online videos, to determine what videos are the most popular on the web. The company offers a paid solution called Bitly Enterprise that provides advanced branding features, audience intel, omnichannel campaign tracking, custom QR codes and more. Companies can use their own custom domains to generate shortened links; for example, ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...

'' uses nyti.ms and

Pepsi Pepsi is a Carbonated water, carbonated soft drink with a cola flavor, manufactured by PepsiCo which serves as its flagship product. In 2023, Pepsi was the second most valuable soft drink brand worldwide behind Coca-Cola; the two share a long ...

uses pep.si. This allows the company to push brand awareness on services such as Twitter but use the Bitly engine to generate the shortened URLs and track marketing metrics. Bitly Enterprise also has advanced analytics features and uses Bitly data to provide advanced social insight tools for companies and brands.

Technology

The company uses HTTP 301 redirects for its links. The shortcuts are intended to be permanent and cannot be changed once they are created. URLs that are shortened with the bitly service use the bit.ly domain or any other generic domain that the service offers. Starting October 12, 2010, users could automatically generate QR codes that, when scanned with a mobile QR code reader, automatically directed users to shortened links. On May 29, 2012, Bitly announced "Bitmarks", a new search feature, with enhanced public profiles and an iPhone app. In 2025, Bitly announced that links made with the free plan would no longer be just redirects, but would instead feature an intermediate page with advertisements.

Preview short URLs

To see a short URL's information, that is to reveal or preview any Bitly URL https://bit.ly/''x'' just append a plus sign "+", as in https://bit.ly/''x''+, for example https://bit.ly/1sNZMwL should be copy and pasted into the browser address bar as https://bit.ly/1sNZMwL+. This allows users to see and check the long URL before visiting it.

Alternative domains

.ly is the country code

top-level domain A top-level domain (TLD) is one of the domain name, domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet after the root domain. The top-level domain names are installed in the DNS root zone, root zone of the nam ...

( ccTLD) for

Libya Libya, officially the State of Libya, is a country in the Maghreb region of North Africa. It borders the Mediterranean Sea to the north, Egypt to Egypt–Libya border, the east, Sudan to Libya–Sudan border, the southeast, Chad to Chad–L ...

. In 2011, the bit.ly address was set to redirect to bitly.com. The .ly TLD is controlled by the Libyan government, which has previously removed one domain deemed incompatible with Muslim law. Bitly users on paid plans can use a custom domain registered separately by the user and redirected to Bitly's servers via the DNS record. Bitly used to offer additional domains: bitly.com and j.mp (using the top-level domain of the

Northern Mariana Islands The Northern Mariana Islands, officially the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), is an Territories of the United States, unincorporated territory and Commonwealth (U.S. insular area), commonwealth of the United States consistin ...

, a commonwealth of the

United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...

). This functionality is no longer available.

References

External links