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Bit.ly to Create Real-Time News Service, Sell Deep Data and Analytics

Bit.ly, the URL shortening service through which Twitter users are channeled when they click links in their feeds, has no plans to serve interstitial ads between bit.ly and the web, even for a small percentage of outgoing links.

But what the company does plan to do is to create a news service, mined from the hottest outgoing links, in the same way that Twitter trends mines most-used words, according to Wired News.

“We’re seeing more than a billion clicks in the course of a month,” says bit.ly general manager Andrew Cohen. “Looking at that volume of data, we can see the most interesting and the most important content that is being shared across the whole of the real-time web.”

Fast Company calls the potential news service “the perfect plan,” saying that, because of the way bit.ly works, “a megaton of prime news-related data” is filtered through bit.ly every minute. “That’s the real-time data mojo that Twitter’s trying to tap into with its new page redesign and search engine, and that Google would desperately love to get involved in,” according to the article.

Bit.ly also plans to sell deep data and analytics from the links put through the service to marketers, reports Brand Republic. “What we see are people, and marketers, coming to Bit.ly and using it almost as an ad server - running campaigns on Twitter, but becoming interested in the ROI on those campaigns,” Cohen says.

Recent rumors have had it that Twitter would like to acquire bit.ly, which snared $2 million in funding earlier this year. Neither company has commented on the rumors.