According to inside sources, search giant Yahoo is considering purchasing the bit.ly. Although several other companies are also rumoured to be in talks with the URL shortener, Yahoo seems to be the most serious contender.
Purchasing bit.ly would help Yahoo better compete in the social media world. Some Internet marketing experts believe that the service isn’t valuable to Yahoo because it can shorten long URLs, but because of the large amount of data it could collect with it. Information such as which URLs are most popular and user behavior would help give Yahoo a competitive edge.
Source | Giga Om