The URL shortener ‘wars’ have quieted down lately and everyone was getting accustomed to Bit.ly’s unchallenged dominance in the space. With close to 80 percent market share a few months ago and still enjoying its position as the default shortener on twitter.com, the outcome seemed more than clear. These days, things are looking a bit more diversified and with a number of big players like Google and Facebook rolling out their own services, things are getting interesting again.
TweetMeme, a Twitter aggregator which uses the microblogging service to determine which are the most popular links at any point in time, runs a URL shortener stats page which shows the state of the market based on the links that pass through it. The site got a recent overhaul which also affected the stat tracker so TechCrunch set out to see the state of the market at the beginning of 2010.
Unsurprisingly, Bit.ly still enjoys a solid lead, but its market share seems to have vanished in the past couple of months. While it got as much as 80 percent of the market in summer, it now hovers at 55 to 60 percent. This may seem a bit puzzling at first, as there hasn’t been anything that would affect the market to such a degree, but it turns out that TweetMeme changed the metric it displays, and now shows absolute market share an… (read more)