Bitly taps AOL Patch exec to be its new CEO

Mark Josephson, who ran revenue and marketing at Patch, was also the former CEO of Outside.in

It's been over four months since Bitly's CEO Peter Stern abruptly resigned back in March without a successor in place. Stern, who co- founded messaging and collaboration service Zenbe, which was bought by Facebook in 2010, was CEO of Bitly for a little over a year and the company seemed to be caught a bit off guard by his sudden departure.

Now the company is finally announcing who will be replacing him: Mark Josephson, formerly of Outside.in and AOL's Patch.

Josephson had been the CEO of hyper-local platform Outside.in when it was bought up by AOL in 2011. He then went to work on Patch, AOL's own series of hyper-local news sites, where he ran both revenue and marketing.  

Before working for Outside.in, Josephson was President and CMO of Seevast Corp and held various positions at About.com, including General Manager and Executive Vice President of Marketing and Business Development. 

Here is what Josephson had to say about his new job:

"Bitly’s potential is even bigger though, because it is positioned to add significant value — in the form of intelligence on top of its unique data set — to consumers, marketers and publishers.  I can’t wait to work with the team at Bitly and our investors to make it happen," he said on Bitly's blog.

Founded in 2008, New York City-based Bitly allows users to shorten links, making sharing easier and allowing companies to gain further insights into campaigns by tracking the shortened links. Bitly powers over 10,000 custom short URLs and offers an enterprise analytics platform that helps web publishers and brands grow their social media traffic.

The company was originally the default link shortener used by Twitter, until Twitter decided to develop its own product in 2009. In February, Bitly introduced link insights, to show users the "life" of a link, along with real-time insights, including the first to save a link, or saving a link that was popular today or in the past.

The company has raised a total of $28.5 million, including $10 million in a Series B round led by RRE Ventures, with participation from new-comer AOL Ventures and previous investors O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures, SV Angel, Founders Fund, Mitch Kapor, and several other angels, in October 2010. 

The company then raised $15 million in a Series C round of funding led by Khosla Ventures in July 2012.

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