Tim Bennett’s blog – Electron Soup

uTag is an attempt to create a monetized link-shortening service along the lines of tinyurl, notlong and is.gd. The original idea of a link shortener was that many URLs are too long or unwieldy to share easily – for instance, Google Maps URLs.

Another recent driver of link shorteners are the short messaging services, such as Twitter, which restrict messages to 140 characters or less. Services like is.gd can compress a URL down to no more than 18 of those 140 characters, giving over more room for other text.

uTag takes the process one step further, by serving Google advertisements on top of shortened links. For instance, the URL http://ut.ag/00k5m redirects to this website, but with Google Adwords served on top (have a look, you really need to see it in action). Here’s the clever part: when generating a shortened URL, you can include your PayPal email to receive 70% of the revenue generated when people click your advertisement. So if you visited the link above and clicked a link, uTag and I would receive a 30:70 split of the pay-per-click revenue generated.

The idea, which emerged from the recent StartupCampOz, is a neat one. You can monetize any page on the internet when you link to it from any other page. The main problem is one of audience. If one of my Twitter friends insisted on using uTag URLs, I’d very quickly defriend them. They would be saying to me (or at least I would be hearing), “Your attention is only valuable to me insofar as I can benefit from it financially.” Perhaps people feel they deserve to be compensated for their efforts. As a reader, I have a right to reject that utterly.

But that’s probably just me (and a certain crowd on the internet). If there was a Greasemonkey or other Firefox plugin which could strip out the ads, I’d install it and maybe not get mad about uTag links. I hate a lot of advertising – not everybody does.

uTag may work very well to monetize off-site links. There may be money in becoming a uTag freelancer, who finds websites and hooks them up to those who are interested, taking a cut in the process. (If there is money in this, expect to see a new breed of comment spam very shortly.) The key will be finding audiences who won’t (or possibly can’t) block or reject you for sending uTag links their way. I would most certainly not send all my outbound links from this website through uTag, because there would be little to gain and much to lose.

I suppose only time will tell how much there is to be gained from uTag. In the mean time, maybe I should code up my own competitor and get back the final 30%!