Paid Link Shorteners Are They Really Worth It

Paid Link Shorteners Are They Really Worth It

Before sending you to the destination URL, the link shorteners first show you one or a series of ads in exchange for giving money to whoever creates the links, so are they really worth it?

When people needed to link to a website, they were usually very long, and almost only the link took up much of the text, so a link shortener was a perfect option to reduce that very long URL to about 10 characters.

Link shorteners emerged several years ago in order to shorten the text of a message, especially in social networks where a short message is important; such as Twitter which gives you a maximum of characters that you can write.

How Link Shorteners Work

How it works and why link shorteners give you money is very simple. To explain how they work, I will take as an example possibly the oldest payment shortener: adf.ly.

When you create your account you have the option of creating a new link to any URL that you want to redirect. This new link that you create before sending you to the destination URL, shows you an ad that usually lasts 5 seconds, you can hit a button that says “skip ad” and then it redirects you to your URL.

Well, the company, which in this case is adf.ly, pays the owner of the account where that link was created for the ad that has been viewed, because yes, every time you see an ad on the internet, someone is making money for that, but this is where the next question comes in.

Are link Shorteners Really Worth it?

First of all, I want to tell you no, they are NOT WORTH IT and let me explain 4 reasons why from my point of view.

Lots of Ads

The problem is that the vast majority of payment shorteners that currently exist do not stay with a 5-second ad, usually, they put no less than 3 ads that you have to see before moving to the next page, and then see another series of announcements.

That is, for a link that you have clicked, you will have to see around 5 or 6 ads not to mention that many times they redirect you to pages that you did not want to see and may have viruses.

Viruses in Link Shorteners

You, as a content creator, are sending the audience that you have had a hard time getting to fraudulent pages that have viruses, which makes those people no longer trust you and stop visiting your website or your videos, in addition to the most obvious: make them upset.

Perhaps you may be thinking: “The shortener I use only shows an ad”; Maybe that’s the case, but this single ad may force whoever enters it to download something that almost certainly has a virus, so we return to the same thing:

The vast majority of paid link shorteners redirect to fraudulent sites and viruses (I say the vast majority because I really do not know all of them).

As an additional thing, I tell you that yes, I used this service, years ago (approximately 5) and I constantly received complaints that those links had viruses and little by little I was losing my audience.

Scam Pages

By saying that there are link shorteners that are scams, I mean that they do not pay, and maybe they will pay you once or twice, but for the third time, they stop paying.

This is the biggest problem with these sites that have not been running for a long time, the fact that they are new means that there is not much information about them, nor users who comment on their experience.

When I was using these websites I came across scam sites twice and I screwed up because in addition to paying you less than a penny for each entry, at the end of the month, they didn’t pay.

Does Link Shortener Pay?

There are shorteners that promise to pay you exaggerated sums of money, for example, a CPM of $ 2.50 per thousand clicks in all Latin American countries.

If you have been working online for a long time, you will know that it is very difficult or almost impossible for that to happen.

To give you an idea: my RPM (which is what Google Adsense pays me for every thousand impressions) for Mexico I have an average of 14 cents; which means that for every thousand ads that are seen from this country, I receive a total of 14 cents and depending on the month it can go up a little or go down almost half.

Then a shortener guarantees that if you receive 1000 clicks from Mexico (or what is the same, that a thousand people enter your link) they will give you no less than 2 dollars. The difference is abysmal, from 14 cents to 2 dollars. Isn’t that suspicious?

As tempting as it may be to make money elsewhere, ask yourself, “Is it really worth sacrificing my audience for an extra $ 5 or $ 10 a month?” It certainly wasn’t worth it to me and that’s why I stopped using those services years ago.


Also Read: Most Ads Campaigns Fails of All-Time

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