Ideas for monetizing a tinyurl/bit.ly type site?

I've been down in the lab cooking up a couple different sites and one of the sites that i just finished coding is a tinyurl/bit.ly type redirection site. My site is in it's early stages (think pre-alpha) at the moment. I do have authentication, user accounts, a personal dashboard (count clicks, get stats, re-target aliases, etc..) and general pages in place. It works very well, but is still rather plain from a design perspective.

So, the question is this... how to I monetize a site such as this? I threw a couple adsense blocks in the pages for good measure, but since the content isn't related to any niche, I get random ads for tech equipment, IPs, and some other random ads that, my guess, have low click through rate. Any ideas on how to make some $ off this?

-HL

Use BHCB on every .. say .. 200th hit on any given link?
You can then revenue share with your customers so that they would still use your services.

But on a more serious note, I don't think there's any utterly fantastic ways to monetize such service and quite frankly - I would never start one unless I have a VERY bright idea in mind. There's already way too many tinyurl services out there. But that's just my opinion

require an ad click or an email entry to continue to the content

redstar504 said:

require an ad click or an email entry to continue to the content

Click to expand...

I thought of this, but that would really make the service less appealing. I also thought of traffic generation - as in... expire links that are XX days old and redirect to an affiliate or something... but then it wouldn't be targeted. Was thinking once there are enough links, could be a link search engine... Maybe even sell redirect traffic from the expired links... but again, that wouldn't be targeted traffic.

This get the wheels turning?

-HL

bryanon said:

Use BHCB on every .. say .. 200th hit on any given link?
You can then revenue share with your customers so that they would still use your services.

But on a more serious note, I don't think there's any utterly fantastic ways to monetize such service and quite frankly - I would never start one unless I have a VERY bright idea in mind. There's already way too many tinyurl services out there. But that's just my opinion

Click to expand...

These types of sites get a ton of traffic, question is, how can you capture that traffic and make $ off of it? Was thinking a "dashboard" as it may be appealing to marketers to capture their click through, per day, month, etc.. or re-target their shortened URL alias to another affiliate program that is doing better for them. Then they wouldn't have to re-post links. I already have this functionality built in BTW.

every 10th or 20th forward, throw one of your affiliate links in, instead of the other persons affiliate link. try to somehow make it pertain to where they were going to get forwarded anyways. OR you could stuff some sort of cookies. go to the cookie stuffing section to learn more on that.