URL shorteners. We use them. You use them. Lots of people use them. URL shorteners like bit.ly are widely used nowadays, but are they really as good as they appear to be?
Mouse in the House digs a bit deeper into the pros and cons of URL shorteners.
On the positive side:
- URL shorteners obviously provide useful features like making a long URL shorter (i.e. so it fits easily in a Twitter message)
- They enable you to track and analyze clicks on a specific short URL
- Some URL shorteners like twt.tl also provide some browsing safety by analyzing the target URL for harmful website code or phishing attempts
But on the negative side, URL shorteners also introduce:
- An additional single point of failure: when a URL shortener service is down (or corrupt) the link won’t work
- Additional load time for a page to fully load
WatchMouse website monitoring monitored the most popular URL shorteners for one month to find out how they are doing in terms of availability and speed. During that time we monitored 14 URL shorteners and collected the uptime and performance statistics. The uptime results are shown in the chart below:
Uptime is still clearly an issue for some of the URL shorteners. This is important because it has a direct impact on the uptime availability of the website the URL shortener actually directs to. Only goo.gl and twt.tl score a perfect 100%.
The performance results can be seen in the chart below:
According to our data, Facebook’s fb.me is by far the slowest. It adds over two seconds on average to the page load time after the click on a link. And, quite a few others still take over half a second of the page load time, which is really way too much for just a URL redirection. This substantially affects the user experience.
Another interesting thing we noticed is that only a few of the URL shorteners optimized their name servers (DNS) for international use – i.e. it takes half a second for some of the URL shorteners just to lookup the IP address that is needed for a browser to retrieve a web page. That means, that while it might be fast for a visitor from the US, a visitor from Asia might get some extra waiting time when using snurl.com, for example.
And, while bitly.pro might offer more options than the free bit.ly (like having your own domain name), the paid version is also slower on average than its free counterpart.
Some details about how we measured all this: The URL shorteners were checked every five minutes from one of the 50 WatchMouse global website monitoring stations. For each short URL, only the redirection was measured, not the actual loading of the target page. The redirection was expected to be done within eight seconds without any errors (like when a server error occurred or if the expected target URL location was not found in the http header). If that time was exceeded or a second error was established, WatchMouse verified the results using another of its monitoring stations and the result was counted as either poor availability or unavailable.
We plan to continue to monitor URL shorteners and as of today, plan to share the results publicly through our brand new website portal: http://url-shorteners.public-website-status.com/. Here’s a screenshot:
You can also receive Twitter alerts so you know immediately when URL shorteners go down by following http://twitter.com/url_shorteners.
Now it’s your turn to tell us what you think. Are URL shorteners useful or can you live without them? Does the additional time to load a page concern you?
Update: as pointed out at in some comments here and at other blogs that followed up on this post: The results of bitly.pro shortheners like tcrn.ch is affected greatly by the name servers of the bitly.pro clients, and those servers are not controlled by the bit.ly people. In the performance chart above the resolve time of tcrn.ch is indeed responsible for the lower overall performance. Binged.it, another bitly.pro client is actually faster, due to a great worldwide DNS performance we saw from our 45 monitoring stations in 26 countries. Also, the bitly.Pro service is actually free!
March 17th, 2010 at 19:05
@Sam thanks for the suggestion, we will add http://y.ahoo.it/ to http://url-shorteners.public-website-status.com/ soon!
March 17th, 2010 at 20:29
Specifically which events are used to bound the “resolve/connect/processing/transfer” intervals? I’m looking to understand your results in terms of network packet flow.
Thanks!
March 17th, 2010 at 21:06
From a high availability point of view, a url-shortener is not the same thing as a stock exchange or any other site for which downtime would be considered a multi-million dollar cost for a few minutes of it. It would be an inconvenience, to be sure, but should any of them build in the infrastructure to ensure NSPOF? I would guess they’d say no. At least not until we as users of their services had to pay for it.
Remember, if you’re using a shortener, you’ve already got the original story/info you’re looking to retransmit. If you can’t use one site, use another. Or post the info in 2 tweets. If you’re not constrained by twitter, then use the original link.
All things considered, I do not mind the second or so it takes to redirect me to where I want to go.
March 17th, 2010 at 21:37
@Jeff, please see here for the definitions:
- Resolve time: Time (in ms) for resolving the IP address of a host name.
- Connect time: Time (in msec) for connection phase of TCP/IP.
- Processing time: Time (in msec) from first byte sent to first byte received (also known as ‘time to first byte’).
- Transfer time: Time (in msec) from first byte sent to last byte received (also known as ‘time to last byte’).
Feel free to use a free trial account to have a closer look: http://www.watchmouse.com/trial.php
March 18th, 2010 at 14:13
Any reason http://Fwd4.Me wasn’t included?
Can it be next time?
Thanks
March 18th, 2010 at 14:14
“…most popular”? what determines popularity? volume? where’s j.mp in correlation to the shorteners included above? could volume also be part of the issue?
March 18th, 2010 at 16:35
This is an interesting analysis, especially the status page and @url_shorteners account. However, I wanted to point out a few inaccuracies regarding bit.ly and bitly.Pro.
1) Binged.it and tcrn.ch (TechCrunch) are both using bitly Pro, ergo, some of the conclusions you make regarding bit.ly vs. bitly.Pro are not supported by the data.
2) bitly.Pro is a free service in closed beta.
3) As per some comments, j.mp is our initial launch of a custom short domain solution, the precursor to bitly.Pro
Best,
Greg Battle
=======
Team bit.ly
March 18th, 2010 at 17:01
@Greg
About 1) Well, the results are consistent, both the connect and transfer time are equal for binged.it and tcrn.ch (as you can see from the chart), the only difference is the resolve time which depends on the host name, and is not related to the bitly.pro service itself.
@Greg @Howard @Rich We picked the URL shorteners we thought are most popular by investigating some articles on the web. We don’t have actual usage statistics ourselves. We also included some new interesting URL shorteners backed by large/hot companies like twt.tl.
We are adding more shorteners to the status page in the next few days, including j.mp and fwd4.me.
March 18th, 2010 at 18:28
You can always roll your own with http://yourls.org/ It would be interesting to be able to throw a shortened link created with yourls at the public page and see how the response time and geographic response compare with the top 5 or something.
March 18th, 2010 at 18:36
can you add cli.gs url shortener?
March 18th, 2010 at 20:12
You chopped the first 100ms off of the “Average performance per rule” graph. Was that all spent on resolution?
If so, lopping off the front of the graph makes the resolution portion of the lookup appear deceptively small. I wonder whether caching or alternate DNS providers (google, opendns, etc.) might help.
March 18th, 2010 at 22:31
URL shorteners are also a way to hand off content and traffic control to another authority. Once the “big boys” snatch up all the URL shortening traffic, they become gatekeepers of the web. At some point they’ll deem a site “unsafe” or “objectionable” or whatever. URL redirect services are a bad idea and a runaround to meet up with the “traffic shaping” mechanisms being used by those who dislike net neutrality. The Internet is becoming a big TV network with widgets/channels.
March 19th, 2010 at 13:35
rurl.org is also not in the list.
March 19th, 2010 at 19:11
Interesting comparison, I however use the one that comes with WordPress for my blog on wordpress. Might be worthwhile to check on that as well. Can you please maybe add wp.me which is the URL shortner from wordpress
Thanks in advance
March 21st, 2010 at 22:05
Between the spam on twitter and their crappy web hosting/server speed they have some really pretty serious issues IMO.
March 28th, 2010 at 17:18
I think the processing time is mainly about: 1) grabbing the site URL from the database, 2) analyzing the traffic. I have to say that in my own (now public) URL shortener I do not analyze the traffic, which makes the whole process much faster.
As for the above comment claiming that URL shorteners are the gateway to more corporate control on the web traffic, I beg to differ. How often do you see shortened links outside twitter and the likes? Not much I guess.
April 13th, 2010 at 21:20
Urlshorts.info has a URL shortening service.
April 24th, 2010 at 16:53
Enjoyed the url shorteners post. Not many blogs worth bookmarking but this is going on Delicious now!
May 15th, 2010 at 20:48
I prefer http://paidly.com url shortener.
May 18th, 2010 at 16:54
There is new site which short your url using more than 10 services once,he called http://www.shortesturl.net
Enjoy
June 29th, 2010 at 12:10
Hi, this is a new url shortener, it seems fast..
http://url.go.it
October 1st, 2010 at 11:31
El acortador de URL de Google “goo.gl” ya es abierto says:[...] Hasta hoy, este acortador de URL sólo estaba disponible para Webmasters, pero ya lo podemos usar los usuarios de calle. Es una propuesta muy interesante, ya que no sólo destaca por su velocidad, sino que también nos de información sobre cuántos clicks se han hecho en un determinado periodo de tiempo (últimas 2 horas, día, mes…) al igual que lo hacen otros servicios como bit.ly. Pero no acaba ahí, si entramos en Details de una URL también nos crea un código QR, y nos hace un análisis como si de un Googla Analytics se tratase (más básico, por supuesto). Sin duda, una propuesta más que interesante para acortar nuestras URL, por ejemplo, en Twitter, donde más se usan estos servicios. *Gráfica velocidad de acortadores de URL | WatchMouse [...]
October 19th, 2010 at 12:27
Mide y Analiza: acortadores de URLs para Redes Sociales | Territorio creativo says:[...] Sanchez: Estudio de acortadores de URLs de SrMuñoz Andrés Flores: Artículo de WatchMouse sobre niveles de servicio de acortadores de URL y Estadísticas de servicio de acortadores de URLs Alex: Acortador de URLs [...]
April 2nd, 2011 at 14:16
Which URL Shortener Should You Use? - TNW Social Media says:[...] speeds. Facebook’s fb.me was by far the slowest shortener when Watchmouse ran the same study one year ago. Now, it’s improved dramatically, with LinkedIn’s Lnkd.in taking the bottom spot with [...]
April 2nd, 2011 at 14:59
Which URL Shortener Should You Use? | Techno Earth says:[...] wаѕ bу far thе slowest shortener whеn Watchmouse ran thе same study one year ago. Now, іt’s improved dramatically, wіth LinkedIn’s Lnkd.іn taking [...]
July 22nd, 2011 at 07:05
Facebook Roundup: FTC, Design Changes, Nestlé, URLs and More says:[...] especially Facebook’s, add to the amount of time it takes for a page to load, according to a recent study from Dutch startup WatchMouse, which monitored the redirection time for 14 URL shortening services [...]
August 21st, 2011 at 14:32
Guys, suggest you to try http://www.cutpit.com, really cool url shortener with N numbers of unique features like tweet, sms email, link management et al, try it, i use that only, its also very reliable.
Cheers!
James