From the archive (2009): Cligs shutting down
On 4 October 2009 Pierre Far announced the end of Cligs: short URLs are a feature, not a business. The announcement as an excerpt, and why the shutdown never happened.
From the archive. This post appeared on blog.cli.gs on 4 October 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.
It is with great sadness that I have to shut down Cligs. On Sunday, 25 Oct 2009 at 12:00:00 GMT, the service will stop accepting new short URLs and will stop logging analytics. The forwarding data will be retained so that forwarding can continue for at least till the end of November.
Why now? Short URLs are a feature, and are definitely not a business on their own. This assertion is fact in my mind given what I'm seeing in the market and what my customers and users are saying. There comes a point when you need to actually hear the message the market is telling you, and not just listen and ignore it. This is the core reason.
Cligs is a big service (for some definition of big). It has tens of thousands of registered user accounts, and does tens of millions of forwards a month. Not bad for a one man show doing this on the side. However, a service this size requires customer support, which is time.
What happened next
The announcement was praised at the time for doing what tr.im had not: users could export their data, and the links were to be preserved through 301works.org, the Internet Archive's escrow for shortener databases. Then the shutdown was called off. On 1 December 2009 Mister Wong, the German social bookmarking company, bought the service. "Short URLs are a feature, not a business" turned out to be the right call anyway; the industry reached the same conclusion when Google closed goo.gl in 2019. The feature survives on cli.gs as the link of a partner programme, where the business is the commission on the sale behind it.