Bit.ly/practice: Uncovering content publishing and sharing through URL shortening services
Daejin Choi, Jinyoung Han, Selin Chun, Efstratios Rappos, Stephan Robert, Ted Taekyoung Kwon · Telematics and Informatics · 2018
It becomes the norm for people to share online content such as images, videos, and news over various channels including online social networks , news media, or online communities. One of the popular ways to publish and share online content is using a URL shortening service, which provides a short equivalent URL that is redirected to an original URL of content. This paper comprehensively analyze the practice of using short URLs from their creations to publishing to sharing, using a large scale dataset that contains 4.2 B requests for 80 M URLs created through Bit.ly, one of the most popular URL shortening services. We find that content URLs are mosunknown.