From the archive (2008): Introducing Right Clig, geotargeted short URLs
In November 2008 Cligs launched Right Clig: one short link, a different destination per country, built for affiliate links. An excerpt and what became of the idea.
From the archive. This post appeared on blog.cli.gs on 10 November 2008, 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.
Imagine you are an affiliate marketer promoting an Amazon product on Twitter or Facebook. You share a link pointing to the specially-crafted affiliate link to amazon.com; you may even shorten it using any of the bog-standard URL shortening services out there. But there is a problem: your link points to the amazon.com affiliate and so you'll lose affiliate click throughs, and their money, from visitors outside the USA. UK visitors will edit out the URL to point to amazon.co.uk. German visitors will go to amazon.de.
Right Clig solves this problem. Right Clig allows you to tell Cligs of alternative destination URLs that are targeted based on the visitor's country. You create "rules" that tell Cligs something like "if the visitor is from the UK, send them to this URL instead" and "if the visitor is from Germany, send them to that URL". You create affiliate links and put them as alternatives and let Cligs do the heavy lifting for you.
What happened next
Right Clig was the first feature on cli.gs built for affiliate links rather than for tweets, two years before the shortener closed. The idea outlived the product: today cli.gs is an affiliate network, and the link a publisher shares still does the heavy lifting, this time by carrying a signed reference code to the shop instead of a cookie. How a cli.gs link works today.