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Private company

Bitly

Logo: bitly, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons3

American link management platform

Bitly is a URL shortening service and a link management platform. The company Bitly, Inc. was established in 2008. It is privately held and based in New York City.2 Wikipedia text CC BY-SA 4.0

Last updated Oct 21, 2026.

Overview

2008Founded1
  • HeadquartersNew York City1
  • Websitebitly.com
  • Slogan“♥ your bitmarks”1

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Bitly is a URL shortening service and a link management platform. The company Bitly, Inc. was established in 2008. It is privately held and based in New York City. Bitly shortens 600 million links per month, for use in social networking, SMS, and email. Bitly makes money by charging for access to aggregate data created as a result of many people using the shortened URLs.2

Products and brands

Products

The Bitly URL shortening service became popular on Twitter after it became the default URL shortening service on the website on May 6, 2009. It was subsequently replaced by Twitter's own t.co service.

The company behind Bitly launched a similar service, but for online videos, to determine what videos are the most popular on the web.

The company offers a paid solution called Bitly Enterprise that provides advanced branding features, audience intel, omnichannel campaign tracking, custom QR codes and more. Companies can use their own custom domains to generate shortened links; for example, The New York Times uses nyti.ms and Pepsi uses pep.si. This allows the company to push brand awareness on services such as Twitter but use the Bitly engine to generate the shortened URLs and track marketing metrics. Bitly Enterprise also has advanced analytics features and uses Bitly data to provide advanced social insight tools for companies and brands.

In December 2021, Bitly acquired Egoditor GmbH, developer of QR Code Generator, as part of its expansion beyond link shortening.

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Technology

The company uses HTTP 301 redirects for its links. The shortcuts are intended to be permanent and cannot be changed once they are created. URLs that are shortened with the bitly service use the bit.ly domain or any other generic domain that the service offers.

Starting October 12, 2010, users could automatically generate QR codes that, when scanned with a mobile QR code reader, automatically directed users to shortened links.

On May 29, 2012, Bitly announced "Bitmarks", a new search feature, with enhanced public profiles and an iPhone app.

In 2025, Bitly announced that links made with the free plan would no longer be just redirects, but would instead feature an intermediate page with advertisements.

Preview short URLs

To see a short URL's information, that is to reveal or preview any Bitly URL https://bit.ly/x just append a plus sign "+", as in https://bit.ly/x+, for example https://bit.ly/1sNZMwL should be copied and pasted into the browser address bar as https://bit.ly/1sNZMwL+.

This allows users to see and check the long URL before visiting it.

From Wikipedia’s article on Bitly, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4

Timeline

  1. 2008Founded Founded1

Sources

The numbers on this page point here. Each one links to the record it came from.

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