Nambu Networks, the company behind tr.im, pic.im, and the Nambu social application for Mac OS and iPhone has announced that tr.im will no longer be shortening URL’s for the public. According to a blog post, the reason behind the decision is Twitter’s decision to use bit.ly for their URL shortening, as well as the cost for servers and development while there are many other solutions for URL shortening.
Nambu Networks will now focus its attention on Nambu for Mac OS and iPhone.
tr.im did well for what it was, but, alas, it was not enough. We simply cannot find a way to justify continuing to work on it, or pay its network costs, which are not inconsequential. tr.im pushes (as I write this) a lot of redirects and URL creations per day, and this required significant development investment and server expansion to accommodate.
Nambu Network’s doesn’t specifically say how many URL’s have been shortened, but looking at Twitter, tr.im was quite popular. The URL’s already shortened with tr.im will not be affected, but all tr.im links will continue to redirect, and will do so until at least December 31, 2009.
tr.im has been added to the Deadpool.
good night sweet price.
shit that deadpool is more like an ocean now
Yes, amazing how many tech entrepreneurs forgot the 1st commandment of business: “make money”. The day laborers standing on street corners have more business savvy than most Web 2.0 startups.
There is a business model behind the URL shorteners but it assumes that you reach critical mass. tr.im simply acknowledges the fact that they didn’t. That’s life and they are doing the right thing.
Yes, Marc, all businesses need critical mass, even if you’re just selling lemonade on a street corner.
Now if your “critical mass” requires millions of transactions before your business model can even kick in (not to mention generate a profit) — and you don’t spend money on mass media advertising to reach it — then you deserve to fail.
You can’t just say “there is a business model.” You actually have to explains it, or you’re just talking out of your ass.
That’s that model? Outside of annoying users with ads until they move to a new service?
URL shortening is not a business. It’s a feature. You can start your own URL shortener in about 15 minutes using an open source project like Kissbe, or just write your own.
What is the business model?
Interstitial advertising? Subscriptions? Sadly non-starters as these services can be easily started by anyone, as pointed out, which means that there will always be free competitors.
is.gd forever!!
su.pr forever
I am waiting for a .ny high level domainname extension, so I can start my own URL shortening service: ti.ny
so why in most of the ccTLDs we dont get a 2 letter domain support ? .in, .cn, .ny none support this !!! and where to get a 2 letter domain with 2 letter extension (no premium domain please). and how does z.pe exist where I see .pe is not allowed to have even 2 letter registration !!! the whole short domain story is so confusing. good if techcrunch writes an article describing it….
by d way the vanity URLs of tr.im are als working. I just found it about http://tr.im/wave_
Hey, heres a idea. How about selling the website. You know- For profit. To someone who will keep running it.
Jesus.
Take your logic elsewhere!
RTFA: “No business we approached wanted to purchase tr.im, even for a minor amount”
Bullshit, someone would have bought that. How else do you think bit.ly has received funding?
Bit.ly is owned by Betaworks, which sold summize to Twitter and is a Twitter investor. They’ve also been smart enough to make a front-end service based on the link popularity data they’ve gathered.
While I agree that its surprising that no one wants to buy it for even $10, its not an apples-to-apples comparison.
Investing in an entrepreneur is far different from buying his assets — particularly when those assets have proven to be money losers.
It’s the same difference as investing in an architecture firm vs. buying a house they built.
The tr.im domain is the *perfect* name for this type of service. Let’s hope someone picks it up, and soon. As for the links themselves … well, I’m just glad I also used Delicious to bookmark a few of the more important ones. Ugh.
You sound like a domainer. Which means I hate you.
But getting to the point: If “tr.im” was the perfect name for this type of service, it would have helped more than it did.
Names aren’t magic. They can’t make a bad business plan profitable.
We will see- I contacted EJW earlier this year regarding tr.im was brushed off. Il send him a message now and will see if he is for real.
“minor amount” == $1MM+
Dude, “for a profit” would mean selling to Tr.im to somebody who wants to pay more than Nambu spent to build Tr.im.
That ain’t gonna happen, because there’s no signficant value in what Tr.im has to offer. Building a link-shortener is too easy to bother buying one, and Tr.im’s “data” is valueless. It’s a database of demographic-free clickthrough data. You can’t make money with empty data.
Anybody who wants to get into the link-shortening business is better off spending the money to build a system from scratch, without Tr.im’s baggage. (Actually, they’re better off not getting into a dead-end pseudo-industry, but this is TechCrunch; I know you guys will never listen to that.)
Tr.im’s primary monetization option is to sell real-time search data to advertisers.
In planning for an online ad campaign, it used to be that ad managers could take a leisurely three or four weeks to gradually ramp up, find the right keywords, test ad-text combinations, and increase their spend in a conservative manner.
Now that huge amounts of traffic are coming from social media (over 20% of TechCrunch’s 7 million monthly uniques) and with URL shortners used for a significant amount of that traffic, Tr.im has access to extremely valuable market intelligence. The payoffs for advertisers? Better access to consumers, better ROI, instant results, product placement at strategic moments and the exploitation of unique opportunities.
As someone who does a lot of valuations of online assets, I’d value Tr.im at roughly $4.5 million to $7.5 million.
The challenge with domain-centric asset valuations, particularly where considerable unmonetized traffic volumes are concerned, is that three quarters of the strategic transactions are private. Sometimes we find out about a price a year or more after the transaction, as in the case of Clothes.com, which sold for 4.9 million in 2008 to Zappos but was only disclosed after Zappos was subsequently acquired by Amazon.
A similar sale at a greater valuation came from TrafficZ’s acquisition of NameIntelligence (NI), which runs DomainTools. That acquisition is currently being litigated over representations and warrants – primarily those made by the seller, but the post-litigation valuation is likely to exceed Clothes.com.
Unlike NI, Tr.im owns a big piece of the Internet through the traffic volume they support. Bigger than Kevin Ham and Frank Schilling? If not now, then soon. What makes Tr.im’s volumes important is that it represents hot traffic, trending traffic.
Competitors to Tr.im suffer from weak TLDs/CCs. Anyone care to litigate an intellectual property dispute in Libya? Or better yet, India – which does not follow UDRP and where substantial punitive awards are increasingly commonplace.
Tr.im was the best service of its type, in part because users enjoyed dedicated URLs and because of the statistical tools. It’s too bad they didn’t communicate with their user base about their interest in selling the service before shutting it down.
First-time sellers (like first-time buyers) often don’t know how to work with investment bankers and are reluctant to do so. They don’t understand deal steps or the psychological aspects of strategic transactions and consequently fall victim to self-inflicted pitfalls. Sometimes they stumble by selecting niche-market bankers or by prematurely setting their sights on a short list of preferred buyers or sellers. It’s a movie we’ve seen before. And have just seen again.
The Begining of the End: tr.im Shuts Down at mavrev.com
http://mavrev.c...trim_shuts_down
can anyone explain why twitter chose bit.ly deliberately? and how long it’s gonna take before some governmental agency looks into it?
common investors which i am sure you were getting at
didn’t know that. anyway, those investors of bit.ly aint gonna be very happy about the prospects of their investment now
What are you on about? This is better for the investors.
how? if it’s unmonetizable?
Because bit.ly has less credible competitors now
horse shoe makers don’t have much competition either, but that’s not much of an advantage
btw it is a terrible idea for them to just shut it down. They can run anything on that url (even a twitter alternative [contact me for a script] )
ALL the best software is referred to as ‘a script’.
lol, yes i was just being sleazy. i just can’t believe that these guys didn’t take advantage of their traffic by building a twitter-complementary service, but instead decided to just drop it. it’s a shame. i have a few ideas on that
It’s just the conduct of business – that’s all.
HollyM
http://www.thessayist.com
Not surprising. None of the URL shortening services make profits anyway.
Think of it. You have servers, staff and so on to keep the service running. Who’s gonna pay for url shortening? No visitors stop to see your website. Even if twitter uses you, you’re screwed even more.
I, for one, can’t wait for the day when twitter does their own URL shortening and we can go back to the day when URL shortening services are relegated back to a seldom-used way to shorten bad an unnecessarily long urls.
bit.ly *is* twitters own URL shortening. Same investors, blah blah blah.
Twitter has a lot of investors and they share only a small one with bit.ly.
Same investor != same company.
same investors does not justify it. that certainly does not encourage people to build upon twitter’s api if they know that some day twitter will choose a competing service as ‘official’. the best thing to do here for twitter is buy a url shortener and integrate it directly in the web client
URL shortening services ARE NOT real business and not ground breaking by any means, so what if a 2-5 can make a million or two collectively yearly, are we going to cover every biz that can accumulate a bit of pocket change or legit businesses making multi millions and building upon their frame work monthly to generate higher revenues.
I know the end-user wouldn’t like it so much, but why can’t they make people look at some ads before they get re-directed to the new url? Then they could justify the server costs and monetize all the urls currently in use…
The advertising market is crap. Even massive content sites like the New York times are having declining ad sales. On top of that, Tr.im had zero brand awareness, undefined user segments, and no proof that users would bother glancing at an ad. No way would they get any kind of advertising beyond pay-per-click Google ads, and no way can you run a high-cost business like that on ten cents per click.
If Tr.im starts slapping ads on links, their “front users” (the people shortening links to tweet) will whine, bitch, and switch to a service that doesn’t have ads.
It’s hard to make money when you competitor is willing to lose more money than you. The only “winner” in this niche (assuming there is a winner) will be whoever has the money to outlast all the others, establish a monopoly, and then shove monetization down the users’ throats.
I never heard of them before today…
then start reading techcrunch. oh wait.
Crappy Web 2.0 marketing, as usual. “We’ll rely on word of mouth…” Great, as long as there’s reason for people to talk about you.
I like how they blame Twitter for their business failure “since Twitter has all but annointed bit.ly the market winner“.
Wow… I didn’t realize Twitter controlled URL shortening. Did TinyURL start four years before Twitter?
Tr.im’s going out of business because all they did was jump on the bandwagon of an easy-to-replicate service with nothing new to offer.
They should blame themselves, not Twitter.
It’s also silly to jump on the bandwagon of a service that also has no revenue and a huge drop-out rate. Other than TechCrunch writers, who’s to say that Twitter won’t be the next Friendster?
Heh..they should have at least thrown a Google ad up on their landing page if they knew they were being deadpooled by TC. They could have at least had a little pizza party to celebrate their hard earned experience.
LOLOLOL. Great call Byron. A pizza party with some cake and candy. that would’ve been nice.
Facebook did well for what it was, but, alas, it was not enough. We simply cannot find a way to justify continuing to work on it, or pay its network costs, which are not inconsequential.
You have to admire the honestly and frankness of their farewell message.
admire them for blaming another company for their own failure? ya, that’s impressive.
tr.im should make available the list of all short tr.im URLs with the corresponding long URL, so other people can mirror it, like Safe.mn is doing since day 1 (http://safe.mn/faq#miror)
Oh boy, I can’t wait for every tr.im link I find during a web search to stop working. Yay.
just wait until all the URL shorteners go under. The internet will be a fine mess.
is.gd forever!!
It’s just the conduct of business – that’s all
To whomever said URL shortening services don’t make money: TinyURL has been extremely profitable for many years, since well before Twitter was around.
care to explain “extremely profitable for many years”?
I can’t understand why they at least couldn’t sell the domain, its would have to be the best name for a service and extremely easy to remember.
URL shorteners are the cancer of the Internet. They should all be abolished!
I refuse to click on all these shortened links.
URL shorteners are Internet’s way of going green – they consume less electrons. Do you have a problem with that?
Green? WTF?
how, by introducing 1 needless server request? (and, ‘electrons’?)
Well, that’s sad. Short urls have a Business Model, there’s actually Big Business there, you just need to look in a different direction. I’m sure I could make a Bunch of money out of tr.im. I won’t tell you exactly how to make money out of it now, but 1M Visitors, there’s a bunch of money in there, and not even with advertising. Users won’t pay for urls shortening, but they will pay for something else urls shortener services offers (can offer). Just call your team, make a Brainstorming and STOP LOOKING AT IT AS A URL SHORTENER, and you’ll get it pretty fast.
And let the link rot begin!
oh snap. I’m screwed
“Nambu Networks will now focus it’s (sic) attention on Nambu…”
If you write for a living, how do you not know how the difference between its and it’s?
Fixed. Thanks.
You forgot to fix it on the Deadpool page as well
Re: tr.im’s blog post.
That was quite a display of whiny bitterness all in one. Yes, it sucks you guys couldn’t find a viable business model, but you were still a player at the table; seems a little shortsighted.
Yes, he does sound bitter.
On the other hand, the feeding frenzy of deluded entrepeneurs in that blog entry’s comments is hilarious. Somebody offered him $1000 for the whole website!
This is one of my fears that the url shortening service I use (in this case it’s bit.ly) will shut down and I’ll be left with a whole river of dead links in the process.
Especially on services such as Twitter where you can’t edit old tweets.
I’m thinking I’ll simply start my own url shortener where I least I can manage the data myself.
Oh and I don’t mean to compete with old url shorteners, mine will simply be a private one for myself.
I see a huge benefit in url shorteners but I see a huge risk pointing all traffic through one source. Kind of like putting all your eggs in one basket.
We haven’t seen the last of the URL shortening industry.
“Just call your team, make a Brainstorming and STOP LOOKING AT IT AS A URL SHORTENER, and you’ll get it pretty fast.”
Exactly right. Look at StumbleUpon’s su.pr. Innovation is what will make or break new players.
“Nambu Networks will now focus its attention on Nambu for Mac OS and iPhone.”
Eric Woodward posted the following on the tr.im blog a short while ago….
“Nambu will very likely be discontinued too, in that there will very likely be no more updates released, but no final decision has yet been made. Same issues there: Twitter advertisers our competitors on their homepage, basically kneecapping us with loads of free marketing to everyone else. It is hard to justify paying developers when you are stacked up against such odds, and people with inside tracks.”
So it looks like the app itself will also dive into the deadpool. Shame, it was my favourite Twitter client.
Dangit. I was hoping more work on Nambu was the silver lining. I really like Nambu for OSX, but there are a few niggling things that I was hoping they would fix.
Compete has them at over 800k uniques, with a healthy growth curve. I’d expect they were pushing much more than that through the redirection service.
Perhaps they could have toolbar’d all the redirection traffic, with a small ad on the bar and passst.
I think the real value of Nambu is in their overall approach. Having a nice desktop and iPhone client (www.nambu.com), a short URL service (tr.im) and a short-pic service for iPhone/etc (www.pic.im) they had a 1-2-3 punch in the making. Just a shame they couldn’t wrap them all together into a revenue generating whole.
If anything, all the best to Eric and the team from a big Nambu (and ex-tr.im) fan.
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Damn. Tr.im was such a cool name too.
Tr.im’s life was cut short
There is always http://pie.im to use which has a bookmarklet
Great, we’re going to see tr.im showcased from now on in every article bashing URL shortening: see, this is why you shouldn’t use it. I guess it also means these services will consolidate even faster now.
WTF? How is real time sharing of popular user content NOT bankable? I think if TinyURL did it for so long on so little, why did tr.im give up so quickly? I think they are not very creative in giving the business idea some direction… the data is certainly valuable, you have to see in what ways it is to your own company that you can bank on or to others that you can sell to with analysis and other services.
I just hope apache can have this built-in
Ditto on the apache front.
Tr.im is back again! Remove it from the deadpool…
Just a thought…why not stop taking new links AND keep the old links alive by showing interstitial ads? Not great but better than breaking the links?