cli.gs, 2008 to 2026: from Twitter's fourth URL shortener to an affiliate network

cli.gs is an affiliate network today. The domain is eighteen years old, and for most of that time it meant something else: Cligs, a URL shortener that for a while was one of the most used on Twitter. This page is the history in one place, with links to the original posts where they survive, because people still arrive here from articles written in 2009.

2008: a shortener built by one person

Pierre Far launched Cligs in the summer of 2008, when Twitter's 140 characters made short links a necessity and tinyurl.com was the default. Cligs stood out with features that the competition added later or never: click analytics per link, an API, a Google Gadget and a Ubiquity command, white-label short domains for businesses, and in November 2008 Right Clig, one short link with a different destination per country, built explicitly for affiliate links to Amazon's national shops. The service was free, had tens of thousands of registered accounts and did tens of millions of forwards a month, all run on the side.

January and May 2009: fourth on Twitter

In January 2009 Far published an analysis of 10.2 million tweets: 18 of the 50 most shared domains were shorteners, and cli.gs was tenth among them. By May, Tweetmeme's live statistics and TechCrunch had Cligs in fourth place behind tinyurl, bit.ly and is.gd. Cligs was also a founding member of 301works.org, the Internet Archive's initiative to escrow shortener databases so that short links would outlive the companies that made them.

June 2009: the hack

On 15 June 2009 an attacker used a flaw in the link editor to repoint about 2.2 million short links at a single page on an Orange County newspaper's blog host. The most recent backup was six weeks old. The numbers published the next day: 2,188,978 links edited, 93% restored, 161,232 lost, of which 95,123 belonged to no account and were sent to the home page for good. The incident was covered by The Next Web, SANS, Securelist and iTnews, and it became the standard example in security research for why a shortener is a single point of failure for every link that passes through it.

October 2009: "short URLs are a feature, not a business"

On 4 October 2009 Far announced the shutdown for 25 October, with data export for users and the link database going to 301works. His reasoning, that short URLs are a feature and not a business, was widely quoted, and the orderly handling was contrasted with tr.im's chaotic closure two months earlier. The shutdown did not happen. Interested buyers came forward, and on 1 December 2009 the German social-bookmarking company Mister Wong acquired the service.

2010 to 2011: Mister Wong, then silence

Under Mister Wong the shortener got a new home page, geo-analytics and, in 2010, a preview page at every short link that showed the destination before redirecting. New links stopped being created around 2011 and the service went dark. The links kept being cited: in blog footers, in the archives of Twitter clients, in WordPress plugins such as WP to Twitter that had used cli.gs as their default shortener. Pierre Far went on to work at Google on search.

2025 to 2026: the relaunch

The domain was relaunched in 2025, first as a link-recommendation community and then, in 2026, as what it is now: an affiliate network. Merchants run partner programmes, publishers promote them with a link of the form cli.gs/@publisher/programme, and a reported sale earns a commission that is traceable from the click to the payout. The link itself is signed and carries its reference code to the shop, which is a direct answer to the 2009 problem of stored pointers that someone else can edit.

What became of the 33,000 old links

In 2026 Google's index still contained thousands of cli.gs short links from the shortener years, all answering 404. The Wayback Machine had captured 33,498 of them with their destinations, including the 2010 preview pages. Instead of sending them all to the home page, as the 2009 restoration had done with the orphaned links, each one now redirects to the cli.gs page about its topic where the destination tells us one, and the seven posts from the old blog that are still linked from the press are republished here as dated excerpts. Short URLs were a feature; the links people shared through them were the real asset, and they deserved better than a 404.

Sources

• The Blog of Cligs, 2008 to 2009, preserved in the Wayback Machine
• The Next Web, "Popular URL shortener Cli.gs, hacked", 16 June 2009
• SANS Internet Storm Center, diary 6589, June 2009; Securelist, "URL shortening service compromised"; iTnews, "URL shortening site hacked to redirect millions of links"
• webmaster-source.com, "Cli.gs URL Shortener to Close", 12 October 2009; Joe Dolson, "WP to Twitter update: Cli.gs to be shut down", October 2009
• TechCrunch, "Following the tr.im incident, 301works is ready to insure shortened URLs", 14 August 2009