I think some used them to gain insight in clicks (bit.ly provided stats for numbers, user agents etc.), and to track the origin of clicks by generating a unique shortened URL for each linking post.
Also, the obvious use case of turning a long direct URL to a file into something people can actually be bothered to manually copy from paper…
IIRC, they originally became popular because they saved characters for microblogs like Twitter. They’ve outlasted their usefulness though.
I think some used them to gain insight in clicks (bit.ly provided stats for numbers, user agents etc.), and to track the origin of clicks by generating a unique shortened URL for each linking post.
Also, the obvious use case of turning a long direct URL to a file into something people can actually be bothered to manually copy from paper…