Lifetime of QR Codes

This post got triggered by this question on Twitter:

"I have some questions about the lifetime of QR codes generated from these free sites?"

Incidentally, this also came up during a discussion we had this week on QR Codes with a text book publisher.

In typical usage of QR Codes today, the encoded link simply points to a URL (eg.

https://getthisdoc.com/A/A5YPAY8Y/)

So your QR Code remains alive as long as the URL remains alive. So it's all good as long as the webserver is responding with your desired content at that URL.

Purely from a lifetime perspective, I would recommend the following:

• Very Short lived QR Codes: You can use a free service like bit.ly, goo.gl etc. You expect the QR Code to be scanned within the next few weeks at most and it is unlikely the big free services would change their terms at such short notice. Do note that most of these services create immutable short urls - which means you cannot change the actual destination link later. There are also privacy issues with free services. This may not be important for personal use but something to consider if you are using this for business. For example, add a + to the url and others can also see the stats. Try:
  http://goo.gl/Zbb0F+
  https://bitly.com/nKhS8o+

• Medium to Long term use: Use a paid service like ours. This ensures that your QR Code would remain usable as long as you are using the service. Paid services also come with support - invaluable if you are using QR Codes for your business. Another advantage of these paid services is that they typically enable you to create and host great mobile optimized pages - so that when someone scans your QR Code, they see something which is usable on the small smartphone screen.

• Long term use: If your QR Code is expected to live for very long periods (eg. text books) - I would recommend using a paid service but with your own sub-domain name. So the QR Code code should point to something like:
  http://qrcode.yourdomain.com/A/A5YPAY8Y.
  This sub domain could be hosted by the same paid QR Code provider but you retain control over the entire lifetime. This ensures that you are not dependent on your provider and can switch the provider or bring this in-house when needed in the years ahead.

Unless you have a lot of spare IT resources, I don't recommend pointing the QR Code to your own webserver for the long term. This is because:

• Over the years someone managing your webserver might change the URL scheme or worse delete the content and your QR Code would become unresponsive. To mitigate this you would need to build a system and train every new webmaster that joins your organization. I have examples of URL's mentioned in text books which stop working because a couple of years later they forgot about these printed mentions and the link went dead.
• Another reason is mobile optimized pages. Unless you already have a mobile website - it would require a lot of effort to first build one before using QR Codes.

Further due to similar reasons I would not recommend linking a QR Code dependent on other 3rd party URLs. You never know when they may change and your QR Code becomes unresponsive.

So to summarize, my recommendations for business use of QR Codes:

• Use a paid service which also hosts your content.
• Encode the QR Code with your own custom sub-domain (eg. qr.yourdomain.com). This is especially important if your QR Codes are expected to be usable for a long time.
• Do not point it to other 3rd party domain names.

This is something to think about before starting to use QR Codes. Once these codes are printed and distributed, you cannot change the link information encoded within it.