9 Comments

May 10, 2016 ,

 Updated June 21, 2018

Shorte.st, in a nutshell, is an URL shortener company that pays you for clicks. It shortens your URL’s and places a intermediary “continue” button which has to be clicked to reach the target site.

And every time this continue button is clicked, you get paid. It has quite a diverse payment module in place, you can choose the methods via which you wish to be paid, the amount you wish to withdraw and couple other things.

There are other URL shorteners out there on the internet, but Shorte.st has couple benefits over them without a doubt.

First of all, it has a higher commission rate compared to them. Secondly, it doesn’t display any third party ads on “your” site, instead that intermediary page I was talking about is used for it. And for the third point, it has around a dozen advanced tools and elements to help your monetization easier.

Our Shorte.st Review

Shorte.st is a platform where advertisers publish their websites for “impressions”, when you open a certain URL using a shorte.st URL, the intermediary page that comes up has some kind of website embedded in it.

Now, this is what makes it special. It does not kill your professionalism in order to make money for you. Because the ads are displayed on an intermediary page, and thus your website does not come up.

Your website remains hidden till the user has clicked on the “continue” button, so, no risk of your website’s reputation going down.

Another great help you get from the intermediary page is, the ads aren’t shown on “your” server, thus no extra load on it. Also, none of your server resources are used, say bandwidth, space or anything else.

So Shorte.st uses their own servers, space, bandwidth and everything else, and still pays you.

Shorte.st gets paid for embedding this website there, and then you get paid because it was your URL which made the impression happen.

Shorte.st ad example

If that’s not enough for you, this impression page doesn’t use your native URL either, so your Website URL doesn’t appear just yet on the URL bar which keeps your URL professional and doesn’t make it look like a cheap fad.

Shorte.st claims that it picks up only validated, verified, and authenticated ads for impressions. Meaning it doesn’t display any scam or any other kind of advertisement that’s not legit.

So you are assured of not letting your visitors come across any ads such as Porn, Gambling or anything or that sort.

Mentionable Shorte.st Benefits

Shorte.st doesn’t just make money for you, it makes your job easier. URL shortening has couple of benefits in itself.

They are Short: This URL:- www.website.com/article/23131/grow-rich/294123 is not as shareable as http://sh.st/wJgZ0. Using Shorte.st sharing the URL’s becomes easier. It adds look to the links, and subtracts the unnecessary.

Not only they make your URL look “good”, they also make them more sharable. And with shorte.st, getting more exposure is the key. So you get more shares, you get more money.

Detailed Insights: Shorte.st has an advanced insight algorithm in place. It shows you exactly which of your link, got how many clicks. This gives you scope to improve your monetization tactics and promotional methods.

You can analyze which platforms, and placement position of the links are working for you, and can double up your revenue.

These reports let you know if a certain monetization strategy is working for you, if it is, you can improve it.

If something is not working, you can push it to the strategy which is working. So overall, it doubles, or even triples your revenue in some cases.

Hides the Original Link: When Affiliate Marketing, it helps you hide your affiliate URL. Which increases your chances of getting more sales. The links look legit, clean and short. Your Original URL is hidden, and you get more sales done.

They help immensely if you’re using redirection. You can redirect your traffic from Source1 to your Shorte.st URL and then to the Sales page. The Affiliate URL never comes up, keeps things clean and professional.

Considering buyer psychology, often times your buyer doesn’t buy the product, just because it’s an affiliate link, because that tells them that you are promoting a product, and you’ll be getting a commission out of it.

So your “honesty” out of the product is sucked out, resulting in lower conversions. Because then they know, you are promoting it for your own profits.

So bottomline is, Shorte.st hides affiliate links, hence you make more sales, more money and you get paid from shorte.st additionally as well.

More Links in A Limited Space

Some landing pages, product sales page and other pages have some rules to themselves. When you have a limited character support on such services, shorte.st helps you include more links, in a shorter space which adds to your power of promoting more product, and hence get more sales done.

Shorte.st Advanced Features and Tools

Shorte.st has a lot of options to help you with the monetization. It’s tools and services help you integrate and use the shorte.st URL’s with ease, get more exposure and clicks thus overall increasing your revenue.

Mass Shrinker

Mass Shrinker is one of the shorte.st options that lets you shrink more then one URL, with a single click.

It let’s you shrink as many as 20 URL’s on a single page with a single click. If you have a lot’s of links to be shortened, it helps save your time and does it professionally.

Shorte.st mass shrinker

Affiliate Programs

Shorte.st also has an Affiliate Program in place to boost your revenue up. The affiliate program works in the same manner as any other affiliate program.

You have to refer users to Shorte.st, and in return it pays you 20% of your referrals incomes for the rest of your lives.

It works on automation, that’s a benefit for you if you want to earn, but not work. So what you do is, you refer some guys using your link. Now all the work will be done by those guys, and not you.

You sit back, and relax. They will work, make money, and 20% of each referral keeps flowing to your pockets, forever. Without you even needing to sign in to shorte.st.

Advanced Website Scripts

Shorte.st lets you monetize your “whole” website with this advanced script.

It adds a line of code to your site, which lets ads be shown to every user who lands on the site helping you get as many impressions and clicks as many hits you get.

This option does not harm your website, although it might not be the best option when it comes to professionalism. But it does boost up CTR and revenue 8-10x.

Custom triggers

Shorte.st custom triggers let you decide some advanced, custom options for your ads.

They add up how exactly you want the ads served, which helps you increase your revenue without bringing down user experience.

Exit intent

It works by monetizing your bounce rate. It shows the ads only when the user is about to leave the site.

This way if you have a high bounce rate, you can get paid for it.

Timings

This feature from Shorte.st helps you decide when exactly you want the ads to be served.

Exactly when a visitor lands on the site, sometime late, never. You can manually set the timing for the ads to be displayed.

This is another feature that doesn’t let your professionalism die. Showing an intrusive ad instantly is one of the worst monetization strategies out there.

While with the “Timing” feature with shorte.st you can choose to display ads only after the user has spent a certain amount of time on your site.

A user stays on your site only if there’s something of value. So this feature verifies that the user is happy with the site, and then serves the ads. This way, it’s not counted as spam.

Capping

It is advanced embedding of the ads. It gives you the options to control the behaviour of the ads. Lets you decide when you want the ads to be displayed to the user.

A viable example is, it lets you show your ads only the second time the user lands on the site. This is one of the examples, it can be customized for more functionalities by you.

By turning this feature on, you are making sure your visitors aren’t frustrated. They land on the site, find something useful. Go back. Clean and neat. They come back again, and this time they will see the ads.

They aren’t frustrated or upset as they already liked your website. So they will tolerate it, that will make money for you.

It’s a more professional, marketable approach to monetize your website as a whole. You can use the website script without capping too, but that’s not the best strategy.

Shorte.st Commission Rates

There’s no fixed rate for any number of hits, and the price you would get paid. It depends on a lot of factors.

Shorte.st pays you around $10.80 (roughly) for 1000 hits. It’s higher, way higher, compared to a lot of other, similar companies out there.

The rates depend on some other factors too, like the traffic source, country of origin and other such sort data. But, $10.80 is the average you are going to be paid.

These rates are definitely higher and better than it’s competition. No doubt about that.

No Website Required

Shorte.st does not make it mandatory for you to have a website to make money with it.

This is what makes Shorte.st a viable option to make money online, other than AdSense or affiliate marketing.

Because, all those other platforms and strategies need a website in order to make money.

With Shorte.st the end goal is promoting the link and getting it clicked.

It gives you the freedom to achieve this goal, via any means you wish.

Final Verdict

I’ll leave it up to you whether this monetization method makes sense for you or not, however. Shorte.st is probably the best url shortener out there. What makes it stand out is it’s highly incomparable commissions.

No other URL shortener pays you as high as Shorte.st.

Secondly, the advanced website features keep your site’s professionalism alive, doesn’t give it a spam look and make money for you in the process.

The stats, sources and everything else keep things professional, and give you scope to improvise your monetization tactics.

Then again, the ads are manually verified. This is not something every URL shortener out there offers you. With Shorte.st you have the peace of mind, that your visitors are served only legitimate, worth showing ads.

As for the last point, Shorte.st does not need you to have a website in order to make money with it. This gives shorte.st the unique capability to be used by each and every person out there who knows what links are.

 

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  • This can make a fair bit of money if you’ve got huge amounts of traffic – I do it with mass uploading YouTube videos.

  • One downside: as an affiliate, it can ruin your reputation. I tried a shortest link recently (for someone else’s site) and one ad simply tried to trick you to downloading its software, another offered a pornographic game, and a third had an aggressive pop-up saying my computer was infected, also starting an audio file saying the same, and made it extremely hard to shut it down. So, feel free to use the service, but also check the ads served up (or have a friend do so, to avoid any chance that affiliates only see the nice ads).

  • Definitely something that’s super important for publishers! Most networks have strict filters for this but accidents happen and bad ads go through – it’s unfortunate!

  • Please Do You have any idea of how much they per click, and by ‘hits’ do you mean impressions?

  • This is 2018, is the site still available, is the platform still working? I heard about ad.ly but that it was banned by most social media like Facebook and twitter. Don’t know if there is any site like that currently

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