Tiny Road to Nowhere

As someone fairly new to website link shortening, I had not yet considered the potential problems associated with shortening a URL.  A recent article in The Economist outlines “the danger of short web addresses.”  The author explains that a shortened URLs—containing little to no information about the destination—becomes useless if the creator of the link shortener disappears.  This results in “link rot” or a growing number of links to nowhere. 

The article notes that there are still around 600 link-shortening services in existence.  A quick Google search for “short link” reveals the vast number of available options.  What you may not find in such a search are the ~400 link shorteners that have shut down in recent years.  It is hard to imagine all 600 of the remaining players sticking around indefinitely.