October 8, 2007

PayPerPost Launches Random New Service. They’re Up To Something, I’m Sure.

Michael Arrington

29 comments »

We heard about a new service from PayPerPost today, and while it’s a little boring, there is nothing about it that I can take particular issue with at first blush (we often find things to criticize with PayPerPost - our past posts are here).

Like the popular site TinyURL, URLbrief lets people exchange a long, difficult to communicate URL for a short one. They’ve added a couple of bells and whistles - The URL creator can link to multiple destination URLs and visitors are taken to one of the links randomly when they click. Also, users can see stats on how many clicks the link is getting and browser data on the people clicking.

The service seems completely unrelated to the main business of PayPerPost, which pays bloggers to write posts about advertisers.

But…and I’m thinking out loud here: Those posts always include links back to the advertiser, so perhaps they will use URLbrief to direct that traffic. This seems counter intuitive, since advertisers want the links to go directly to them. But rumor has it that Google has been trying to find ways to penalize PPP blogger links. Perhaps this is a way to minimize any collateral search engine damage from direct links. The stats feature of URLbrief also provides good, verifiable data back to PPP as to how many people click the links, which may help them monetize advertisers more effectively.

Who knows. No conspiracy theory is too outlandish when it comes to this company. All I know is, they’re up to something, I’m sure. There are way too many services out there just like this, and there is absolutely no revenue model around this service. Their blog post on the new product is here.

Sphere It

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Fake Michael Arrington

October 8th, 2007 at 11:18 pm

URLbrief seems totally unrelated to the main site of payperpost. I am sure the investors know what they are upto…[:)]
LOL

October 8th, 2007 at 11:57 pm

I remember this article

* As for this company having no future, have you done ANY research at all?
* First you say that the only people that would work at such a company are those with no brains, no self confidence, etc etc. I take offense at that.
* The thing that amuses me most about your post though is how easily you are swayed by loud noises.
* I wish you the very best of luck in your search for a “career.”
* I know there are lots of safe little environments out there with well structured corporate ladders that you can happily spend your days climbing and climbing until eventually you retire.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007.....candidate/
Dan Grossman

October 9th, 2007 at 12:11 am

I wonder why they built this just weeks after I built URLSplit and it was covered by R/RW, Lifehacker, etc.
Notsure

October 9th, 2007 at 12:17 am

Mike,

For a company you despise so much - its amazing that you have written 17 posts about them.

Has to be great for their PR ?
Sachin Jain

October 9th, 2007 at 12:17 am

can anyone guess how many URL shortners are there in Webspace..I guess more than 100..
EH

October 9th, 2007 at 12:37 am

Multiple buyers per keyword.
Michael Arrington

October 9th, 2007 at 12:44 am

EH - ahhh, yeah. that makes sense actually.
tomthree

October 9th, 2007 at 2:46 am

i think you actually work for them.
sputnick

October 9th, 2007 at 3:27 am

Insightful post, smart thinking. Glad to see Mike A. earning his keep.
sputnick

October 9th, 2007 at 3:28 am

By the way, are these guys making any money yet?
Seth Finkelstein

October 9th, 2007 at 4:47 am

Regarding: “But rumor has it that Google has been trying to find ways to penalize PPP blogger links. “

1. Google’s unhappiness with paid links (not PPP, but paid links in general) is well-known

2. Google is perfectly capable of logging into PPP and seeing who is buying, and what keywords they want.
(I’ve thought of looking at whether there’s an effect, but decided I didn’t want to get into the fight here).
delboou

October 9th, 2007 at 5:03 am

basnoercov
Json

October 9th, 2007 at 6:21 am

MA & PPP: Get a room!
Dan...

October 9th, 2007 at 6:49 am

Thx for the coverage Mike.

And…just for you…a random walk around the TechCrunch Network: http://urlbrief.com/bc84ff
The Foo

October 9th, 2007 at 7:02 am

I really can’t think of an advantage of having the multiple random url feature.

Stats is a good though. although it may seem unrelated to their other business, if you look at it closely, the stats part may actually be used by them to gather demographics, geographical info and more. Is it that they are trying use URL brief to create an indirect less than obvious analytics solution (after failing to get performancing earlier in the year).

There is got to be something that benefits the PPP revenue model as they won’t spend their money, time and energy on making something unrelated (and just for fun).
Alfred Toh

October 9th, 2007 at 7:13 am

Looks like they are definitely up to something, they working on this unreleased product Argus - http://izea.com/ or whatever.. izea or whatever. Since Reviewme have been harassing them (competitors ) and Reviewme is part of Text-Link-Ads, they might as well also compete in that arena - selling Text Links. I bet you that almost all their posties , the nickname they give bloggers who uses ppp, are Text-Link-Ads users. So why not take a piece of the pie from them by offering a similar feature. The reason to URLBrief is simply - it has been much talked about relying on third party service when u can develop one yourself in no time. Using tinyurl puts your entire business on another company to keep their service up. If tinyurl goes down.. for whatever reason, even though it has been pretty reliable, but to develop something like tinyurl is probably a weekend job using Ruby on Rails, so why not make your own and kick it up a notch with those extras.

Here the theory: The whole idea of Text-Link-Ads is selling links back to your site to build your PR. but honestly does that work? What if - you use UrlBrief multiple links concept with the Text Links? You essentially get to have a link that drives traffic back to 10 different urls. Text-Link-Ads does not provide any stats on your clicks. So using URLBrief does, of course, you could using a open source stats like awstats on your server to get referrals stats but if your intend is to drive traffic through a single Text Link ad to several sites, or different landing page on your site. This sounds like a good combination.

Any thoughts?
Alfred Toh

October 9th, 2007 at 7:33 am

And oh Dan Rua from Inflexion Partners, who invested in PPP, trying to embed Google text link ads in one of his post.

http://www.floridaventureblog......lates.html

He must be just doing that for fun…
Sean Dowers

October 9th, 2007 at 7:42 am

Why hasn’t Google moved against this? You would think that a company full of the “smartest people” in the industry could figure this out.

1) Join Payperpost.
2) Review all outstanding opportunities.
3) Create filter banning links to URLs listed in opportunities.
4) Penalize the sites these links appears on.
5) Go water skiing.

Each of the opportunities has a specific URL that needs to be added to the post. Snag those and go to town.
Clement

October 9th, 2007 at 8:25 am

Sean, you raise an interesting point. But I am just wondering if such a move will not have any legal repercussions.
phenom

October 9th, 2007 at 8:51 am

hmm they are back in news

http://vidsonly.blogspot.com
Steve Ballmer

October 9th, 2007 at 9:20 am

“a little boring” … understatement of the year!

http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
Trevor

October 9th, 2007 at 11:10 am

Dan Grossman:

Creating tags.
————————————————————————
r1 | daniel | 2007-09-19 10:53:02 -0400 (Wed, 19 Sep 2007) | 1 line

Above is our first subversion check in of the URLBrief project. Coincidence is a marvelous thing. Oh our developer who created it is also named Dan G. Weird.
EH

October 9th, 2007 at 4:36 pm

@8: Nope, I work for a company that TC has written about only once, maybe twice.
Dan Grossman

October 9th, 2007 at 9:51 pm

@Trevor: So, 12 days after URLSplit is running and all over the blogosphere (check the date on the post at readwriteweb.com), it gets copied. Is that what you’re trying to show?
Adrian

October 10th, 2007 at 3:51 am

http://weeit.com/ also makes long URLs short
Pete Wright

October 10th, 2007 at 2:29 pm

Dan, lol - sorry that backfired. We have used TinyURL in the past and wanted to come up with our own. Trevor was hoping the first check in date was actually earlier than that.

We have two versions of TinyURL (the service that inspired you to write your version) here, and URLBrief was the one we released. It was originally started about 2 or 3 months ago. The other version was actually finished June 1st 2007.
Dan Grossman

October 12th, 2007 at 8:26 pm

URLSplit was not inspired by TinyURL. Its purpose is not to shorten URLs, but to have a single URL redirect to multiple websites. And provide basic stats for the URLs. Exactly what URLBrief does.

If anything, the use of strings instead of IDs to identify URLs was inspired by YouTube’s URLs.
Money Blurbs

November 1st, 2007 at 6:45 am

There is a demand for PayPerPost and their growth reflects it. So, there is no point saying that its not good. Even Google is scraping content from online newspaper. People use it because they find value in it. And so is PayPerPost.