From the archive (2009): Analysis of linking patterns on Twitter
In January 2009 Pierre Far analysed 10.2 million tweets and 2 million links to see which domains Twitter users shared. 18 of the top 50 domains were URL shorteners. An excerpt.
From the archive. This post appeared on blog.cli.gs on 5 January 2009, written by Pierre Far, who founded and ran the Cligs URL shortener. We publish an excerpt here because the original address is still linked from around the web; the complete original is preserved in the Wayback Machine. A note from today follows the excerpt. The background is in cli.gs, 2008 to 2026.
This post documents an analysis of 10.2 million tweets containing 2 million links. Those links were analyzed to understand which domains are most used. The analysis shows that tinyurl.com is the most used domain name; cli.gs is the 18th most used domain name; of the top 50 domains used in links, 18 are URL shortening services; of the URL shortening services, Cligs is 10th most used.
The top 18 URL shorteners accounted for 1,395,892 links, or 67.4% of them. Grouping sister domains, tinyurl.com held 75.09% of shortener links, is.gd 7.67%, bit.ly 4.84%, the snipurl family 3.43%, ff.im 2.88%, twurl.nl 2.69%, tr.im 0.87%, budurl.com 0.51%, adjix 0.35% and cli.gs 0.35%.
We have an absolute classic of a long-tail data set: the top 50 domains accounted for 1,628,666 links (78.6%). This is a very narrow head and a very long tail.
What happened next
Four months later Tweetmeme and TechCrunch put Cligs in fourth place among shorteners on Twitter (the May 2009 post). Of the eighteen shorteners in this table only bit.ly and tinyurl.com still exist in their old form; tr.im, is.gd's competitors and most of the long tail went the way Cligs did. The dataset itself, the December 2008 Twitter scrape, is still cited in research on link rot. What two million shared links taught about publishing is still true: a handful of destinations get most of the clicks, and a link only earns something when someone trusted it. That is the model cli.gs runs on today: partner programmes where a recommendation pays commission on a reported sale.