77% of a URL shortener's 2009–2014 links are already dead

The team behind 0.mk, Macedonia’s first URL shortener, recovered a database backup of 657,607 links created between 2009 and 2014 and re-crawled every destination in August 2026. Of 655,178 crawlable links, 76.7% failed to return a loading page — and ‘loading’ is a generous bar, since parked domains, login walls, and ‘content removed’ notices all counted as alive. Collapsing the set to 494,781 distinct URLs barely shifts the result: 78.7% still didn’t load. The authors are careful about their own numbers, noting that 403 and 429 responses may reflect bot-blocking rather than deletion, so ‘did not load’ is more honest than ‘gone.’

The decay is uneven. Centralized giants — YouTube, Wikipedia, Google properties — largely survived, while personal blogs, forums, photo hosts, and local news dominate the dead set; of 133,605 hostnames, only 34,827 had even one URL still resolve. The Macedonian layer is the sharpest illustration: outlets like A1 Television and the newspapers Utrinski Vesnik, Dnevnik, and Vest have shut down, their reporting now readable only through the Internet Archive, if at all. The short links outlived the newsrooms that filled them.

The relaunch is its own commentary on the current moment. 0.mk closed in 2014 because ad revenue couldn’t cover hosting, spam filtering, and abuse review for a three-person side project; the team credits AI with automating enough of that development, moderation, and monitoring to make a comeback viable, now served from edge nodes in more than 300 cities. The dataset also captures compounding fragility — 4,478 links point at other shorteners such as goo.gl, which Google discontinued in 2025, leaving chains with working front halves and missing middles. Link rot squared.