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SOPA and PIPA on the social web - right now!

bitly in 2011

From Kim’s short-lived marriage to the earthquake up and down the east coast of the US, more data resonated through the social web this year than ever before.

World events reshaped the geography of the Internet, such that we saw 392 times the number of clicks on Egyptian (.eg) URLs in 2011 than in 2010.

The number of new social sharing platforms continued to increase with the addition of new networks like Google Plus and chime.in.

 

Even diddy and the Dalai Lama got their own bitly short domains this year:

and

And boy does the social web love celebrities! 

all of the clicks in 2011

Yes, 3% of all clicks on links went to pages about top celebrities this year, including some of our favorite gaffes and rumors:

But don’t lose faith in humanity! We saw significant traffic to the top news stories around the year’s meaningful events:

• Jan 2011: Obama’s Speech, The New Yorker
• Feb 2011: Photos from the Protests in Egypt, The New York Times
• Mar 2011: Massive Earthquake Hits Japan, boston.com
• Apr 2011: Is Sugar Toxic?, The New York Times
• May 2011: Adm. William McRaven: The terrorist hunter on whose shoulders Osama bin Laden raid rested, The Washington Post
• Jun 2011: Kissing Vancouver Riot Couple are Identified, The Hollywood Reporter
• Jul 2011: Murdoch exits London home with arm around Brooks, Reuters
• Aug 2011: Best Places to Live, CNN Money
• Sep 2011: Live Stream from Outside the Georgia Prison Where Troy Davis Is to Be Executed, The Nation
• Oct 2011: Apple: Steve Jobs Has Died, Time
• Nov 2011: The Herman Cain crack-up, The Washington Post
• Dec 2011: The Bomb Buried In Obamacare Explodes Today-Hallelujah!, Forbes

Of course, there were lots of cats…

cutest cats by month

And a ridiculous number of rickrolls!

Overall, it was one big year with more than 25 billion clicks on more than 7 billion
URLs!

Happy holidays, social web.

This post lovingly crafted by the bitly science team. We would love to hear from you!

‘Tis the Season for Movies (and Data)!

As we approach the peak of holiday movie season, we’re curious to see which of this year’s films will be break-out hits. With the help of our new reputation monitoring service, we can use bitly data to see which movies people are talking about, as these conversations unfold. By entering relevant search terms (in this case: the titles of the films themselves, and other keywords such as “movie” or the names of the films’ actors) we can discover trending content around holiday films in real-time, and the sentiment associated with that content.

We’re collecting data about every film being released at the end of the year, so the list is more expansive than your normal ‘Top 10 Holiday Movies of the Year.’ We’re hoping as you watch the ebb and flow of these graphs over the next few weeks that our data will help you predict which movies will be box office hits. Share your predictions in the comments below, and stay tuned for a post by our data science team about what movies are in the lead.

How Science Lovers see the Internet

This month we collaborated with our friends at Scientific American to produce a visualization of how people who read about science see the internet (hint: there are a few surprises!)

You can pick up the December issue to see it in glorious print on the last page of the magazine, or click through below to play with the interactive visualization.

Do kittens really rule the Internet?

  We long ago crowned cats the kings of the internet, but is   that really the case? What data supports their reign?

  And, with Thanksgiving approaching, might the turkey be   competitive?

  We went deep into the bitly data to discover which   animals really rule the internet, and the answer might   surprise you:

While cats have a respectable lead, the winner is clear — dogs are 37% of the total results in the cute animal set, and feature in 50% more pages than cats!

  Our favorite dinner bird gave a strong showing, however, hovering   between monkeys and bears. If we dive into the turkey-based content,   we see an amazing knitted hat (left), the basic roast turkey recipe   from RealSimple and, of course, a LOLTurkey.

  We wish you a happy Thanksgiving filled with delicious food, cute   animals, and entertaining URLs!

bitly and Verisign

One of our investors brought his teenage daughter by the office the other day. She was puzzled.

“Bitly has an office?” she asked her father. “I thought it was, you know, just part of the Internet.”

We took that as a great compliment — over the last three years, bitly links really have become a ubiquitous part of the web.  A recent Microsoft Research report even claims that short links can account for as much as 1% of the new URLs created on any given day. 

With that kind of scale comes a great responsibility in terms of technical reliability and redundancy. Which is why we’re pleased to announce a new agreement with Verisign, which operates two of the Internet’s root nameservers and much of the web’s DNS infrastructure. If there’s a single company that qualifies as the steward of the Internet, it’s Verisign.

Verisign and bitly already work in tandem nearly every time a short URL is clicked. On any given day, bitly translates hundreds of millions of short URLs into standard web addresses; last month alone, we handled 8 billion such redirects. Verisign takes those long URLs and translates them into IP addresses, resolving over a trillion monthly DNS queries, including every URL hosted on a .com, .net or .gov domain. 

These two steps constitute the core infrastructure of the social web, and bitly’s relationship with Verisign aims to make them completely reliable and blazingly fast. 

Beginning this fall, bitly’s primary data center will be hosted on Verisign’s global infrastructure. That’s saying a lot, since Verisign’s infrastructure has maintained the .com namespace for more than a decade with zero percent downtime.  

Verisign’s architecture has been integral to the growth and stability of the Internet at large, and we could not be more excited to work with them. Scientists at both companies are already poring over volumes of DNS resolution data — data that will help us answer fundamental (and fundamentally awesome) questions like: “what actually are the most popular websites on the Internet?” and “just how big is the Internet, anyhow?” 

Stay tuned, as we’ll be sharing our findings here.

We See into the Future

bitly sees the future!

Not in a time-travel, causality-breaking way, of course. bitly sees the future by knowing what is popular and exciting on the internet before anyone else does.

Scientifically-minded purists will argue that we only know the present. Fair enough.  Yet we can see much of the future by understanding the present while others are still catching up with the past.

bitly has been working on real-time search powered by bitly data for quite some time. Unlike other search technologies, which weight results by the quantity of references or links, bitly search weights results by cross-platform social engagement. Collaborative filtering (the wisdom of crowds) is an obvious value of social media, and real-time search is an obvious way to package that value.   

Finally, we are ready to release several different services based on this new type of search technology.  The first, launching today, is called “reputation monitoring.” What it lacks in catchy naming, it makes up for in awesomeness: given a search term, it will alert you when there is a sudden change in engagement and/or sentiment around content involving that term. Because these alerts are built on bitly’s realtime social data, you can find this content long before you see it on a search engine based on crawling web pages, and probably long before you see it on a news site. 

We created some interesting monitors and thought we would share them with everyone. Try these: politics, products, and startups.  You won’t get the email alerts when these sample terms trend, but you can click on the graph and explore the content.  The monitors live off of real-time bitly data, which on average lead major search engines by 12 hours or more.  If you have any ideas on what else we should be monitoring, let us know. Of course, you can monitor any terms you like with a bitly Enterprise account. 

Extracting the ebb and flow of trending topics and identifying viral content hours or days before you will see it in the news, on Google, or on Bing is quite amazing. We don’t know where it will lead. The internet made the world flatter. Social media and real-time content sharing are making the world thinner.

You just shared a link. How long will people pay attention?

How long is a link “alive” before people stop caring? Does it matter what kind of content it is, or where you shared it? At bitly we see a lot of links, and while every link is special, we’re learning a few general principles that we can share.

Let’s take a look at one particular story - Baby otter befriended by orphaned kittens - which was first shared by StylistMagazine on Facebook on Tuesday at 7:12am.  If we plot clicks over time for this link, we see:

Rate of clicks per 10 minutes on “Baby otter befriended by orphaned kittens”

We can evaluate the persistence of the link by calculating what we’re calling the half life: the amount of time at which this link will receive half of the clicks it will ever receive after it’s reached its peak. For this link the half life was 70 minutes, which captures all the clicks between the grey lines on the graph above.

Let’s look at a second link - East Coast earthquake: 5.8 magnitude epicenter hits Virginia - , this one first shared by the Washington Post on Twitter.

Rate of clicks per minute on “East Coast earthquake: 5.8 magnitude epicenter hits Virginia”

While the exact details of the traffic are a little different, and the scale of the traffic to this link is much larger, we see essentially the same pattern: a fast rise, and a more relaxed drop-off. Noticeably though this link a half life of only 5 minutes: after 5 minutes this link had seen half of the clicks it would ever see.

This link is associated with a very timely event (an earthquake on the US East Coast) as opposed to the previous link (pictures of otters and kittens are clearly interesting all the time). We think that this difference in content drives the difference in dynamics of these two links. However, one alternative theory that comes up again and again is that the dynamics of the link traffic depend on where the link is posted: do links posted on facebook last longer than they do on twitter?

So we looked at the half life of 1,000 popular bitly links and the results were surprisingly similar. The mean half life of a link on twitter is 2.8 hours, on facebook it’s 3.2 hours and via ‘direct’ sources (like email or IM clients) it’s 3.4 hours. So you can expect, on average, an extra 24 minutes of attention if you post on facebook than if you post on twitter.

Distribution of half-lifes over four different referrer types. Facebook, twitter and direct link (links shared via email, instant messengers etc.) half lifes follow a strikingly similar distribution.

Not all social sites follow this pattern. The surprise in the graph above is links that originate from youtube: these links have a half life of 7.4 hours! As clickers, we remain interested in links on youtube for a much longer period of time. You can see this dramatic difference between youtube and the other platforms for sharing links in the image above.

The graph shows the distribution of half lifes for each referrer. So we’d expect to see link half lifes of less than 20K seconds (5.5 hours) for facebook, twitter and links shared directly, and we’d be very surprised to see any link maintain significant traffic for a lot longer than 60K seconds (16 hours). But for youtube, we’d be a little surprised to see half lifes of less than 5 hours!

In general, the half life of a bitly link is about 3 hours, unless you publish your links on youtube, where you can expect about 7 hours worth of attention. Many links last a lot less than 2 hours; other more sticky links last longer than 11 hours over all the referrers. This leads us to believe that the lifespan of your link is connected more to what content it points to than on where you post it: on the social web it’s all about what you share, not where you share it!

This post brought to you by the bitly science team! Questions or comments? Email us.

bitly Has an iOS 5 SDK!

As you may have heard, the forthcoming fifth version of Apple’s iOS has some very cool share-to-Twitter functionality baked directly into the operating system. We have been hard at work on an SDK that will allow iOS applications to automatically use branded bitly short links with this functionality. (For example, news.me shares to Twitter with on.news.me branded links.) Our SDK also supports iOS 4 via Twitter OAuth.

Since iOS 5 has not yet been released, we can currently only offer this SDK to developers who have signed the applicable NDAs from Apple. If you’re working with iOS 5 and want to check out our SDK, drop us a line at api@bitly.com!

bitly Acquires Twitterfeed

For years now, we’ve worked closely with our friends at Twitterfeed to enhance their social media publishing tools with branded short links and realtime data. Today, we are excited to announce that we have acquired Twitterfeed, and to welcome both Twitterfeed and its users to the bitly family.

The publishing workflow provided by Twitterfeed constitutes a core part of the bitly ecosystem. Along with other products (such as SocialFlow and dlvr.it) that use bitly to share content and track engagement, Twitterfeed is both creating and consuming gobs of bitly data every day. Twitterfeed had over a million active users last month, and we look forward to empowering them with even more actionable insight from bitly data. We also look forward to bringing the enhanced sharing functionality of Twitterfeed directly to bitly.com, making it easier than ever to collect, organize, shorten and share links.

We are already hard at work with the Twitterfeed team thinking through ways that combine our efforts to make the social web a better place. We will keep you in the loop as we roll out changes to both Twitterfeed and bitly, and we welcome your thoughts and feedback.