TECH: Startup cuts Web addresses, promises money

By BRADLEY J. FIKES - Staff Writer | Thursday, August 21, 2008 7:12 PM PDT ∞

CARLSBAD ---- Lengthy, unwieldy Web addresses become short, snappy aliases with free address-shortening services such as TinyURL and SnipURL. A new company, Adjix, is offering better than free: It pays those who sign up to use it.

Adjix caters to what it calls a growing need for short Web addresses. People not only send addresses by e-mail, they increasingly use text messaging on cell phones, which has very limited space. To those who live a cell phone-centric life, short Web addresses are a necessity.

Adjix, which launched on Tuesday at http://adjix.com, places ads on its short address aliases. Those who sign up for the service get a cut of the ad revenue, said Joe Moreno, Adjix's president and founder. Moreover, Adjix users can track how many people have clicked on their links. Users can get 20 cents for every click to an ad their message generates.

The ads are text with hyperlinks. They are placed at the top of the Web page viewed through the alias.

Like other address-shortening services, Adjix translates an unwieldy address into a much terser set of letters and numbers. The shorter addresses are much easier to type and handle.

Adjix gives an example of a Mapquest locator map with an address of more than 450 characters. An address that long usually gets mangled when e-mailed. The recipient will have to manually copy the link and paste it into the Web browser.

Adjix supplies an alias that is just 21 characters, which can be easily displayed as a clickable link.

Moreno said the shortened address is suitable not only for e-mails, but also can be sent via a cell phone's Short Messaging Service. The service, called SMS, has a limit of 160 characters. Adjix can be also used with Twitter, a service popular with technophiles that lets a user "broadcast" SMS messages to many subscribers.

Adjix even supplies an "ultra-short" version of the address, useful for cell phone messages. Instead of using the domain name of Adjix.com, the ultra-short version uses the domain name ad.vu, thereby saving four precious characters.

Steve Rubel, a prominent tracker of digital marketing and social trends, said users would find this to be "definitely a strong service." Rubel is a New York-based senior vice president of Edelman Digital, a unit of the Edelman public relations firm.

"It's easy to see why bloggers and people on Twitter may skip using TinyURL or another URL-shortening service when they can conceivably make money by using Adjix," Rubel said. "However, the ad frame could easily annoy their readers/followers."

Advertisers will wait and see if the service takes off, said Rubel. He blogs about digital media at www.micropersuasion.com.

On Wednesday, Guy Kawasaki, a venture capital investor who first became famous as an Apple computer "evangelist," gave Adjix a plug on Twitter. Traffic to the company's Web site "spiked for hours," the company wrote on its blog.

Contact staff writer Bradley J. Fikes at (760) 739-6641 or bfikes@nctimes.com.

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