Bitly Is Shutting Down “Bundles” Because Of Spam & Low Use

Bitly is shutting down “bundles,” its feature that gives users the ability to share groups of links with one shortened link.

Bundles were introduced in November 2010 but never gained traction, Bitly said in a blog post last week. Fewer than 2% of bitlinks were added to bundles and bundles received less than 3% of page views. Worse, more than 80% of bundles contained spam content and “are often used as publicly accessible text box for questionable content.”

So on April 7, Bitly will put existing bundles into read-only mode and on May 7 the company will shut them down. In place of bundles, Bitly will be adding a new link-tagging feature that will enable people to organize links, the primary non-abusive use for bundles. Bitly hasn’t released details about the new Tags feature, which it says will go live on April 7, but said data from bundles will be migrated into the new system.

From the blog post: “Tags is built with our current product in mind, meaning that this solution will be able to scale and grow as your marketing initiatives do.”