Bit.ly has just announced a $10 million Series B round led by RRE Ventures (which has invested in Drop.io, Xobni and BuzzFeed, among others) and joined by AOL Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, Betaworks, Ron Conway’s SV Angel and a host of others.
This round brings Bit.ly’s total funding to date to $15 million; this number includes $1.5 million of debt financing.
The service also reported that it is decoding approximately 200 million URLs per day, and claims to be the 69th largest website by traffic volume, according to stats the startup pulled from Google.
All of this good news comes at an awkward time, however, given the recent controversy over the “.ly” Libyan top-level domain (TLD).
Although URL shortening sites and other startups with services grounded in URLs ending “.ly” have become something of a trend in recent years, some have found the use of Libya’s TLD dangerous. Blogger Violet Blue had her vb.ly shortener and site completely shut down because Libya’s domain registrars found her content (and we note that there’s actually no content on any shortened URL; they’re simply redirects) offensive and in violation of Islamic law.
While it seems Blue was singled out, as sex-positive feminist bloggers are wont to be, there’s no telling whether the same shutdown might occur if Libyan officials decide to look into some of Bit.ly’s shortened links, many of which lead to similarly “offensive” content.
However, none of this news seems to have had a blunting effect on investors’ enthusiasm for Bit.ly, and the numbers make is easy to understand why.
Here’s a chart showing “daily decodes” — that’s the number of Bit.ly links clicked around the web — over the past two years. The blue link shows actual clicks, and the red line shows a three-week average.
Since its beginnings, Bit.ly has been used to shorten more than 4 million unique URLs. And just this year, Bit.ly links have been clicked 40 billion times. With the rollout of Bit.ly Pro, the company is capitalizing on those metrics; this white-label service is being used by roughly 3,000 large companies and many smaller companies as well, the startup reports.
We look forward to learning what Bit.ly plans to do with the new funding — more staff and servers, perhaps some new, resource-intensive features? What do you think Bit.ly’s next move will be?
Reviews: Google
More About: .ly, AOL ventures, bit.ly, funding, libya, ron conway, RRE Ventures, startup, sv angel
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