Rebrandly API - Empower your app with custom short links

@davidedeguzlink @adithya Thank you Adithya for hunting us! I'll be here to along with other team members to answer any questions.

@davidedeguzlink @adithya Interested in working with our API to prevent people from shortening malicious links? You could have a "trust" element to the offering. paul at metacert.com if you're interested.

@paul__walsh @davidedeguzlink @adithya Hi Paul! Thank you for the inquiry and apologies for the delayed response. So we actually built Rebrandly off the back of our existing technology called ClickMeter. With ClickMeter, we have the ability to assure the best quality in all of our tracking links, as ClickMeter constantly checks the URLs against the most popular blacklist and validator online services. The system checks the main domain of the links our users insert into their destination URL field the moment they try to create a short link. So...not being a developer myself, I for sure will forward this question and a link to Metacert to our team to see if there's a way for us to "combine forces" ;) Thanks again!

@vincemagaline @davidedeguzlink @adithya Awesome stuff. Just so you know, I hold a full, issued patent for checking the security of a URI inside an app - issued in May 2016. But that's not why you should work with us :)) I'm one of the two people who co-instigated the creation of the W3C Standard for content labeling and URL classification and we have the world's biggest database of classified URLs. Gimme a shout if you'd like to work with us :) We license to other security firms too btw.

@duplikey Yes, it's called link trust. It has a few components to it: 1. People recognize the domain you are sharing as being related to your brand and therefore believe they are going to the destination location that you are providing. 2. You are giving them a descriptive url slug, such as mybrand.xyz/keyword or derric.link/facebook, and this reenforces that they will be going to the destination URL they want to be going to. 3. You are able to use the link to convey it's own message, such as rebrandly.news/producthunt (which takes you to this page). That link pretty much explains everything about the destination right from within the link. Think about how people are deciding whether or not to go to a destination. A lot comes from the name, the title, and the image of the social post, but some of it also comes from the link. A more trustworthy link gets you more clicks (and less hesitation). Thanks for asking.

@duplikey Thank you for including us in your @ProductHunt list of Italian Products! https://www.producthunt.com/@dup... Really appreciate the support Raffaele!

@giuliano84 Bitly is currently the go to URL shortener right? But almost everyone using Bitly is using their generic link shortener domain: bit.ly. This means people are spreading Bitly's brand when sharing links online. It's really counter-intuitive, yet just kind of accepted as "OK." We connected Rebrandly with a domain registrar so that you could easily buy and connect any available domain and use that as your own branded link shortener. This has been proven to increase brand awareness, link trust, and click-through rate. And it's either free (if you have a spare domain or use a sub-domain) or very cheap $2-$12 to do so. Our mission is to have every marketer and personal brand sharing links under their own branded URL shortener, with keyword oriented URL slugs - so no more "/5EhnDk" at the end of the URL, but instead "/awesome-blog-post" (URL length is also no longer a huge issue as Twitter makes all URLs 23 characters long regardless). Another key differentiator is price point. Bitly is geared towards larger companies and starts their price at $500/month. We are structuring our advanced analytics packages and offers to be a lot closer to $50/month, and might even have smaller packages at as cheap as $5/month. We haven't launched any paid products for Rebrandly as of yet, but will be rolling them out alongside some advanced features very very soon.

@sixpeppers @giuliano84 Interested in an alternative to bitly for my SaaS startup, as their platform isn't as good as it should be, but this doesn't really answer the question fairly. Bitly does allow you to connect your own custom domain, and offers 5,000 bitlinks per month for free, or 500 branded links for free. Most people just aren't aware that they can do this, so are you competing on price, or awareness/execution? Also not clear from the rebrandly website what click stats you get for free, or whether you pay $99/month for them, or whatever usage you need from clickmeter's plans.

@claudeschneider @giuliano84 Yes. You get 500 branded links created per month under one domain with 30 day analytics tracking for free. Our package will be comparable to that, except when we move into the paid side we will have plans starting at $50/month, maybe even a lot less than that. For click stats, we currently only have a click counter. If you connect with ClickMeter you get a lot more detailed data. We are building out a comparable free stats dashboard and will have an advanced one in our paid version. One other thing we do differently is that we just launched our built in UTM builder. Bitly wants you to pay $500/month for this. This will be free to use forever in Rebrandly. Overall I'd say there are two clear differences: 1. We are targeting a market in between the Bitly free and Bitly paid user, and 2. We connected our own domain provider so that you could easily purchase and connect any branded domain. This allows you to do things like buy a domain specifically for a keynote you're giving, or maybe try and impress an influencer on social media. For us, we now have 5 different domains that we share links with on Twitter. We use brandings.link when sharing content on branding, Rebrandly.news when talking about ourselves, and so forth. It's a new way for social media managers to become unhinged from the domains they share links under.

@joshuafechter @davidedeguzlink Hi Josh! Really good question! The short answer, YES. Rebrandly will tell you how many real-human clicks you are getting, which is all that matters because spider bots aren't doing anything for your bottom line. If you're looking at the stats on your Rebrandly "Links" page, the click count you see indicates the Real-Human clicks, so yes, it eliminates them. Thanks for asking!

@joshuafechter Hi Josh. Yes it automatically removes bot and spider clicks on the link. Any time you share a link on a public site, some sort of bot/spider is going to crawl it to check the destination URL and make sure the link isn't spammy, as well as to catalog the link in an index. This takes place billions of times a day behind the scenes of the internet. In fact, most links are clicked on more by bots, than by real humans: For that reason, it's very important we only report human traffic. As those are the only clicks we really care about. Right now Rebrandly reports all real clicks under one click counter, but soon we will be reporting unique vs non-unique, referral sources, location information, and a handful of other advanced tracking features. Thanks for asking the question.

@anant_garg Really good question! The answer is YES. So let's say you create a shortened link and share it across 12 different networks, then, some day down the road, the page that link points to is old, or moving to a new site, or maybe you no longer work for that company, or whatever it is. It's going to be hard finding and changing all those old links, right? HOWEVER, with Rebrandly, we let you own your links. If you want to change out the destination URL, it takes two seconds. And it will automatically update those 12 links you shared all those months ago. Crisis averted.

@vincemagaline Thank you for that long answer. But am sorry my question wasn't clear. Let me try and explain. Suppose I have a custom domain eg abc.com. If someone visits abc.com, can we redirect that to a URL (ie our actual website)?

@anant_garg Ahhh, okay I got it now. The answer is again YES, and I just double checked. We're working on an FAQ for that right now actually. I'll follow up very soon with exactly how to go about doing that. Thank you again for the question Anant!

@anant_garg Yes you can redirect the main domain. There are more limitations for main domain redirecting than regular link redirecting. For example, LinkedIn has removed the option of allowing domains to redirect to any of their pages. Also, we've installed a Rebrandly banner at the bottom of all of the domain main pages. Right now there is not an option to remove this banner, but it will likely be possible in the future.

@sixpeppers @anant_garg Thanks Derric! See Anant, told you we'd get back to you very soon ;) Hope this answers your question and thanks again!

@sixpeppers Buffer already supports custom domains via Bit.ly (Pro)

@emilstahl At $500/month minimum, and only under one branded domain. Rebrandly is 3rd on the integration list with Buffer, if we were to be added, anyone could use a branded domain for free, and quite easily switch between branded domains if needed (or assign one domain to each channel or account within buffer, etc). Quite a big difference.

@daniele_patrioli Awesome! I'd be interested to know which clients ;) Thanks Daniele!

@sujanpatel Hello sir. Thanks for asking. It's true that it's called a URL shortener, but shortness is no longer the most important factor when sharing a link. And in fact, it's not even the most important aspect to a URL shortener these days, tracking clicks is probably the most important one (that or embedding UTM parameters, or link retargeting). Shortness was much more prevalent in the early days of Twitter, before they made all their links always count as 23 characters. So now, as the industry of URL shorteners progresses, we care more about how well branded our link is, how legible it is, and how memorable it is. That's why we went with rebrand.ly rather than rbrnd.ly or re.ly or anything like that. That being said, shortness is still important, and a shorter domains is better than a longer one, but you should no longer sacrifice keywords or legibility for length. And when it comes to our own domain, we don't even want people to user rebrand.ly, we really want everyone to find their own custom domain to share under, that way you are sharing your brand and not someone elses. We may even open up some fun generic shorteners to our whole audience in the future. Names like newsworthy.xyz, nerdy.news, or socialmedia.tips and what not. Sidenote: I wouldn't go investing in any 2-3 character domains based on the "value of short domains" any time soon. Thanks again for asking.

@sixpeppers @sujanpatel Great question Sujan! PRETTY...pretty...pretty good answer Derric ;)