Bit.ly dishing out 4.7 billion clicks a month

There are over 150 million clicks on Bit.ly links each day. The amount of data running through the service is massive, and continuing to grow at an incredible pace. But we’ve known that for a while. Just as impressive may be what Bit.ly is doing with its premium service, Bit.ly Pro.

Today, the service is announcing some of the huge names across the web have signed up to use Bit.ly Pro. Yahoo, MySpace, The Huffington Post, Politico, Pepsi, NPR, Scribd, Toys”R”Us, CSPAN, Dailymotion, IMDB, the New York Times, Bravo, Mozilla and Amazon have all joined in recent months. We started using the service shortly after it launched in December — those tcrn.ch you see all run through Bit.ly Pro.

There are now over 12,500 publishers and brands using the Pro version of the service, Bit.ly says — that’s more than double the number they released just two months ago. All told, there are over 1.7 billion monthly uniques for these Bit.ly Pro users.

Overall, Bit.ly hit 4.7 billion decodes (their term for clicks) in May. That’s nearly double what it was just this past February. The service is now the 76th most visited site on the web, according to DoubleClick.

Bit.ly is also announcing a new partnership today with Webtrends. Later this Summer, Webtrends will start incorporating Bit.ly data into its analytics packages.

CrunchBase Information

bit.ly

MySpace

Yahoo!

Politico

Pepsi

Scribd

Dailymotion

IMDB

The New York Times

Mozilla

Amazon

TechCrunch

DoubleClick

Webtrends

Information provided by CrunchBase

Pandora is going to explode with the new iPhone

Remember when Pandora was on its deathbed? Yeah, those days are long gone. The service has just raised yet another round of funding, we’ve confirmed. The round was led GGV Capital and participated in by Allen & Company, They’re not disclosing the amount raised, but you can bet it’s fairly substantial considering that they’re last round in July of last year was $35 million. Up until now, Pandora has raised just about $57 million in total.

The new money will be used to further fuel growth and invest in new resources, the company says. Back in April, the company passed the 50 million user mark (up from 40 million the previous December) just as they launched their new iPad app. Mobile growth has been a key for the company, and it’s likely to explode even further with the launch of the iPhone 4.0 OS which will allow Pandora to run in the background for the first time. Despite the restraint, Pandora has been one of the top downloaded apps of all time in the App Store.

But the new iPhone ability may bring with it some issues as well. Since it’s undoubtedly going to be used a lot more, Pandora is going to be streaming a lot more music for free (currently, music is served for free until you hit 40 hours in a month, then you’re asked to pay $1 to get unlimited access). The more music Pandora streams, the more it has to pay to the labels and artists. Of course, more music also means the more ads it can serve up (most of Pandora’s money comes from advertising).

Pandora has also been signing deals left and right with other device makers, and even car companies to extend the service’s reach.

Pandora’s last round of funding came right after it was officially saved following a comprise reached between webcasters, artists, and record labels on Internet streaming music rates. Thanks to that deal, its new freemium model, and the improving ad market, Pandora was able to go from a near-death experience to profitability in the course of just a few months.

Earlier this year, the New York Times reported that Pandora had hired Steve Cakebread to be its new CFO. Cakebread was the CFO at Salesforce.com when it went public, so that was seen as a possibility the company was looking at. But with this new money, that seems to be off the table, for now at least.

CrunchBase Information

Pandora

iPad

iPhone

The New York Times

Salesforce

Steve Cakebread

Information provided by CrunchBase

Only if you like the newspaper THAT much

The New York times is going to start chagrining for there site. That means you have to pay for certain features on there site so heres my question, will you pay to use the New York Times website?

Whats wrong with China you ask? They don't like porn

Chinese mobile providers will monitor text messages in the country for “illegal or unhealthy content” and suspend service when a customer inadvertently sends up a red flag, according to a report in The New York Times.

Companies like China Mobile will turn the potentially offending messages over to the authorities to be reviewed. If the customer is cleared of any wrongdoing, his or her service will be restored, but it doesn’t look like the mobile providers or authorities are going out of their way to clearly define what constitutes an offense.

Police will provide words to scan for to catch potential criminals in the name of fighting pornography. We reported a couple of weeks ago that more than 5,000 arrests were made on pornography charges in 2009 to prevent the scourge from “overwhelming the country’s Internet and threatening the emotional health of children.”

We’re not sure which words are on the list, but the Times quotes Beijing University telecommunications professor Kan Kaili who claims that “they are doing wide-ranging checks, checking anything and everything, even if it is between a husband and wife.”

Married couples? That could be a problem for the pornography flags, people. This seems to be par for the course if we’re getting the full story here in the West, though — Google has threatened to leave the country if China doesn’t make an effort to improve freedom of speech.