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Reddit needs help

• swilliams 16y ago
  It's good that they're seeking ways to increase revenue, but this comes across as nearly cyber-begging. "...we can right now only offer you our undying gratitude and an optional trophy on your userpage." Yikes. What else could reddit offer for subscribers other than a png? Can reddit or similar platforms find a good way to generate revenue? Obviously ads and merchandise (t-shirts, etc) aren't doing it alone here.
  • fossuser 16y ago
    I think they are generating revenue, just not enough for Conde Nast to increase their budget. This seems like a way for them to get extra money that they can personally use toward the site.
    • axod 16y ago
      It seems likely they aren't actually making a profit yet. 4 engineers, servers, etc seem like they could be costing way more than a few ads bring in.
      • blhack 16y ago
        Doesn't digg have something like 40 full time employees?
        • axod 16y ago
          I thought it was even more than that at one point. But I think Digg went the "perpetual investment" route as a business model didn't they?
          • Super_Jambo 16y ago
            Definitely seen an article stating Digg had 70 employees.
    • sethg 16y ago
      ...unless, of course, the Conde Nast “mother ship” sees the income figures from the reddit subscribers and says “Nice revenue stream. We’ll take it!”
  • EvilTrout 16y ago
    There are tons of sites where people can (and do!) pay money for a simple PNG. I'd know: my web based MMO, Forumwarz is one. People can pay to buy some kinds of "E-Peen" which is our version of badges.
    • deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    • famfam 16y ago
      Nice game. I logged in to play it a bit. I'd love to hear how the game is doing for you (e.g. paying for itself, ramen profitable, ferrari profitable). I'm actually in the middle of developing a browser based "MMO" myself right now. (Nothing deployed yet.)
      • EvilTrout 16y ago
        I worked on Forumwarz for about 3.5 years full time, although my salary was far from glamorous. I'd say I was eating a lot better than ramen though :) It was amazing experience that I wouldn't trade for anything, and I met so many amazing people and learned a lot, but eventually I realized that earning half of what I was capable of earning as a developer wasn't a good idea in the long term. I now maintain the site on a part time basis along with a half dozen volunteers. The site still pays its operating costs but there isn't too much left over. My goal is to run the site as long as possible, which is a lot more affordable now that it isn't doing 40M pageviews a month.
  • mdwrigh2 16y ago
    They don't actually have merchandise that generates a profit. All of their merchandise is done through breadpig, where 100% of the profits go to a charity.
    • city41 16y ago
      Although that is admirable, shouldn't they get themselves on solid financial footing before donating?
      • kn0thing 16y ago
        Sorry for the confusion here, but reddit's merch is produced by and for reddit's profit -- just sold via the same xkcd store as breadpig. I did run both (before leaving reddit) and only the profits of breadpig merch is donated.
        • mdwrigh2 16y ago
          Oh, interesting. Thanks for clearing that up. I think that could be made slightly clearer on the website, though as far as I'm concerned, supporting Reddit or supporting charities are both win situations, so it doesn't matter all that much.
  • stevelosh 16y ago
    > Yikes. What else could reddit offer for subscribers other than a png? Isn't their code base open source? More money may mean less time spent fixing slowdowns and more time spent on the core code. If you're using their code for something of your own that could be one motivating factor.
• kloncks 16y ago
  Similar to what Gruber does to live. I like it.
  • deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  • scorpion032 16y ago
    What does he? Ask users to pay for seeing daringfireball without ads?
• jessriedel 16y ago
  A user's willingness to pay is going to be based either off of charity (a la NPR) or as an exchange for a service/good. You can't have both, simply due to human nature.
  • jackowayed 16y ago
    Sure you can. I routinely pay more for things when I know that the proceeds are going to a good cause. The way I look at it is that it's both a purchase and a donation. Say I see a cool T-shirt that some charity is selling for $25. That's pretty steep for a T-shirt. I'd probably only pay around $15 for a T-shirt normally. But if I like the shirt and like the charity, I might buy it anyway. I view that as a $15 purchase and a $10 donation. Stuff like that happens all the time.
  • pavs 16y ago
    You don't know reddit community. They will gladly pay monthly fee (which is not forced) just to get a gold icon on their "Trophy case". Its not because Reddit users has more expendable expenses compare to other online communities its because reddit community is more "involved" than other online community I have ever seen. Just compare reddit charity to Haiti fund and Digg doing the same thing. Reddit: http://dri.convio.net/site/TR?pg=fund&fr_id=1030&pxfid=1511 http://dri.convio.net/site/TR?pg=fund&fr_id=1030&pxf... Digg: http://dri.convio.net/site/TR?pg=fund&fr_id=1030&pxfid=1910 http://dri.convio.net/site/TR?pg=fund&fr_id=1030&pxf... They both promoted it, they both blogged it in their official company blog. Kevin rose personally tweeted it to his 1million+ followers. And they got 4k measly dollars and Reddit got $185k, albeit reddit started few weeks sooner, but still.... I am not trying to make a reddit > digg derpity derpity derp argument, I am just saying that people greatly underestimate the power of "involved" community. Not a community by page views numbers ala Digg.
    • potatolicious 16y ago
      Reddit is the only online community I've ever been in where I've met and befriended fellow members in real life; I've been online for a fair while. There's a connectedness there that simply does not exist for most online communities. Hell, I go to a weekly board games and hang-out night with fellow redditors in the area - no other internet community has ever compelled me to do that before.
• vaksel 16y ago
  280 million page views a month and they aren't breaking even to support 4 engineers? wtf
  • vinhboy 16y ago
    They need to put a link to Amazon on their site and earn some referral cash. Just a thought...
  • jackowayed 16y ago
    It sounds like they are profiting. They just aren't having high enough profits that Conde Nast is willing to cut into said profits to either spend more on servers to speed it up or hire another engineer.
    • chriseppstein 16y ago
      companies invest in their business units and let them run at an operating loss for long term viability all the time. I call bullshit. The reddit guys need to do a better job selling their plans to their bosses.
      • jordanb 16y ago
        Conde Nast wants a return on their investment (rumored at $65m). So tiny and flat profits are going to be unacceptable to them. Probably the situation is this: Advertising isn't very lucrative on Reddit, so Nast has told Reddit management that they must come up with some plan to steepen the profit curve, or they're toast. And this is what they've come up with.
  • axod 16y ago
    They have a userbase which is ridiculously hard to monetize (IMHO). I'd bet the % of adblock users on Reddit is way higher than the average. The Reddit crowd aren't your average mainstream user. It's a particular crowd (liberal anti-capitalism pro-cannabis etc etc) [Again, just my opinion] Also they really have very few adverts at all on the site, and those that are there, are tucked away not very noticable. Say you get an eCPM of $0.05 or something (A guess for that sort of site so I may be way off)... That'd work out to $14k/month in ad revenue for 280m pageviews.
• jamesshamenski 16y ago
  Conde Nast looks like a bunch of chumps right now. I doubt Mike Raldi will last longer than a year if he has to raise funds in this way.
  • cag_ii 16y ago
    Unless you have some inside information, what on earth makes you think that Conde Nast is to entirely to blame? The people over at reddit have made two thing clear: that Conde Nast won't increase their budget unless they increase their revenue. And that their current budget is not enough for them to run reddit the way they would like. I'm certainly not defending Conde Nast, nor will I blindly defend reddit. And I certainly don't expect any company to run a site the size of reddit out of charity. I will donate, as I've been a long time reddit user who enjoys the site (though somewhat less as time goes on).
  • nir 16y ago
    To be blunt (we are talking Reddit..) Conde Nast were chumps when they allowed Chris Anderson, high on his own supply, convince them to buy Reddit for its supposed "Long Tail News" value. Now they're chumps for not putting a grown up in charge of converting 280 million page views/month and a dedicated community to enough money to support 4 engineers and a bunch of servers. The comparison to Gruber etc is misleading, since Gruber never got bought by a major company. This is more like 30 Rock asking you to donate to NBC.
    • keysersosa 16y ago
      > Conde Nast were chumps when they allowed Chris Anderson, high on his own supply, convince them to buy Reddit for its supposed "Long Tail News" value. That's not how it happened. > Now they're chumps for not putting a grown up in charge I like to think of myself as a grown up. > converting 280 million page views/month and a dedicated community to enough money to support 4 engineers and a bunch of servers. This is the crux of the problem. Marketing and ad sales is out of our direct control and has been lacking, so we've had to resort to other options. Self serve advertising last year was one of them, and it has done us well. This is more extreme for sure, but our plan is to eventually go towards the optional subscription model (like Ars Technica or Fark).
• rms 16y ago
  I gave them $5.
• clistctrl 16y ago
  Let me pay $10, and all I ask for in return is site stability and maybe a sweet icon next to my name when I comment. Honestly I bet you could get 100k subscribers within a week. People are hopelessly addicted to these aggregation services, and if subscribing gives us the self assurance that their be around for us to continue enjoying them the fee is worth it. I don't expect you to remove the sponsored ads either (actually i'd be a bit disappointed if you did... its nice seeing ads for small businesses I haven't heard about) A few downsides, once you start charging me I'm going to gain some expectations. Downtime is going to be harder to excuse then it was before is just one example.
  • xal 16y ago
    This is essentially how Shacknews worked since '99. People who subscribed got a lightning bold next to the name and got uncapped downloads on fileshack. This worked out very well for them.
  • jedberg 16y ago
    > once you start charging me I'm going to gain some expectations. Downtime is going to be harder to excuse then it was before is just one example. One of the main reasons we hesitated so long. We didn't want to let down the community, especially those that paid. As always, we will do our best to keep the site up, and hopefully this new income will make it so we can afford the redundant servers we need to do a better job at it.
    • silverlake 16y ago
      Can't you find interns to help you with stability? Even I would help for free just to get some experience with a very large site.
      • jedberg 16y ago
        Each time we've had a new programmer come on board, it takes about 6 months for them to become familiar enough with the code to make a solid contribution. In the mean time, it actually slows us down a bit. That was the main reason we didn't seek programming interns this summer -- it's a great thought, but would probably take too long to ramp them up.
• deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
• avar 16y ago
  According to this talk they're paying around $250k/year for server hosting at EC2: http://pycon.blip.tv/file/3257303/ http://pycon.blip.tv/file/3257303/ See the question at around ~27m into the video.
  • axod 16y ago
    WTH are they using EC2 (One of the most expensive hosts around)?
    • shawndrost 16y ago
      Can't find a link for this, but one of the employees mentioned that it was related to Conde Nast's arcane rules about buying and managing servers.
      • nostromo 16y ago
        This is one of those cases where it's totally appropriate to just do what's right and lie to your parent company.
      • jedberg 16y ago
        It has nothing to do with that. It is simply that EC2 offers us the best bang for the buck for our requirements (one of the main ones being able to spin up a lot of iron very quickly).
        • tb 16y ago
          May I ask why you don't use another cheaper provider for fixed base load and reserve EC2 for peak load capacity? Is it that the overhead of running on two different providers not worth the money you'd save? Or is this something you've considered doing but haven't had the time to implement yet?
          • jedberg 16y ago
            > Is it that the overhead of running on two different providers not worth the money you'd save? Or is this something you've considered doing but haven't had the time to implement yet? Pretty much yes to both of these. With so few of us, the overhead of running it and moving to it just doesn't make sense at this time.
• city41 16y ago
  I think if any site could pull this off, Reddit could. Somehow, somewhere, someway, Reddit became a social news site that has a strong sense of community to it. Redditors feel good being "Redditors", and feel an affinity towards the site. My prediction is this actually works.
  • vaksel 16y ago
    most sites can pull that off, almost every forum has the subscription model where all you get is some icon and different color username. actually I think for reddit it'd be a little harder for comparison...because with those forums, the people know they are supporting small time folks...with reddit, they'd be asking people to donate money to a for profit billion dollar corporation.
  • muppetman 16y ago
    Yup, I donated. They are so open and honest, they don't pull any tricks. The consistently listen to feedback. I see lots of people bashing reddit and from a glance at the Frontpage I can see why. But the real good stuff is in the subreddits. I'd also donate to HN too, if asked.
    • potatolicious 16y ago
      Having met a couple of the reddit guys, I gladly donated. They're the ones running the site and deciding how it evolves - not some faceless corporate drones at Conde.
  • Zak 16y ago
    I bought a t-shirt from kn0thing at startup school a few years ago, but I can't really see paying for reddit now. I wish them luck in finding a business model that works for them.
    • kn0thing 16y ago
      Thanks again for buying that shirt, Zak :)
    • 16y ago
• benologist 16y ago
  I paid. I love reddit.
• moultano 16y ago
  Every company/product with a strong community and few employees that I've seen try this has worked massively well. http://unknownworlds.com/ http://unknownworlds.com/ is a great example. When it was still just a halflife mod, and the creator wanted to work on it full time while bootstrapping the company, he asked for donations to get a special icon in game and playtesting access. There was an incredible outpouring of support and it kept them in the green. Now, to fund the stand-alone sequel, they are taking preorders far in advance to help the development, with an option to pay $20 extra for the game to get special black armor in-game and their eternal gratitude. Almost all of the preorders opted to pay extra, mostly out of thanks for the years they spent playing the first game for free.
  • potatolicious 16y ago
    Good to see a fellow NS player! I've also gone for the "special edition" preorder - knowing full well that there's a non-negligible chance that the studio may well fold before they ever ship a product. Sometimes the worth of something, and the spirit of those pursuing it, is worth reward/support in and of itself.
  • MicahWedemeyer 16y ago
    I can definitely see it working in "help the little guy" situations, but I'm much less skeptical that people will open their wallets when the little guy is backed by a mega-corporation.
• endlessvoid94 16y ago
  http://www.Flattr.com http://www.Flattr.com
• coryl 16y ago
  This models works: Fark has had premium users for a while now.
• run4yourlives 16y ago
  I don't want to kick someone when they are down, but this just stood out to me: And reddit's revenue isn't great. The good news is, our traffic continues to grow by leaps and bounds. Talk about doing it wrong. When you have growth but no revenue, it's probably because you aren't asking your users to pay. That should be every website's first option - ask people to pay for the service they receive. Paying users are great, un-paying users are a liability.
  • maurycy 16y ago
    Not quite. Sometimes, free users increase the network effect; also, sometimes the longer they use the system, more likely they are to pay for it eventually.
    • run4yourlives 16y ago
      1. I'll concede the network effect, but if you are having trouble supporting - for example - 10,000 users with a .5% conversion rate, 100,000 with that same conversion rate isn't going to help you. You need to change the ratio, not just grow. 2. You'll need to find me some stats that back up the point that there is a relationship between the length of time a user is on a site and their commitment to purchase. If this is true, all websites should see increased per capita conversion rates over time. I don't think this is the case, but please prove me wrong.
  • axod 16y ago
    Paying users aren't the only way. Reddit could have started at the outset with adverts. They could have made that decision early on that they were going to generate revenue. But they didn't - which is why Reddit has attracted the sort of demographic that don't click on ads.
    • zach 16y ago
      A very good point -- the characteristics of a website's community is determined usually well before, and only rarely after, its point of big growth. Reddit definitely ended up with, um, less-monetizable DNA, and didn't want to "sell out," so that characteristic never changed. It's also a good illustration of what Joe Kraus said in his brilliant Startup School speech -- when you put your product into beta, put your business model into beta at the same time. They could at least make their ad display scripts deposit tokens for the user via async requests, and throttle users who run out of them. It's a better way of thanking me for not running AdBlock than a PNG of the alien giving me the thumbs up.
• TheSOB88 16y ago
  The problem is twofold: Adblock being used by many of the users, and half the ads when you're not are self-ads that sell nothing.
• davidw 16y ago
  I don't know, I think paying money for nothing in return to a big corporation is a little bit insane, actually. $5, in the right hands, would go a long ways in Africa or various other places in the world where people have real, urgent needs. Or if that's not your thing, there are all kinds of real charities out there. Hell, if you want, you can send the money my way and I'll put it in my daughter's college education/future fund. She's even cuter than the reddit alien and doesn't have such extremist political views ("pacifiers for all!" is probably the most controversial). Joking aside, I think there are a lot of people in Africa, Haiti and, sadly, many other places in the world, who would get a lot more out of a few dollars than my daughter, who will hopefully never experience anything like the sort of privation many people see every day there.
  • run4yourlives 16y ago
    Unfortunately there is a basic economics lesson here: Value is in the eyes of the consumer. The fact of the matter is that people do in fact value giving $5 to a giant corporation for leisure activities more than they do giving that same exact $5 to some person in need in Africa. (That isn't to suggest they aren't giving a different $5 to Africa, just that they are rich enough to do both.)
  • lukev 16y ago
    My initial reaction was to agree with you, and certainly you have a good point about it possibly being more ethical to give money you don't need to charities. But at the same time, Reddit is much closer to home for redditors. If I spend 30-60 minutes a day on Reddit, and like it, it has a very measurable impact on my life. It is in my own interest to keep it running. Whether it is a large corporation or not is beside the point. And by donating, I can become a "part" of the site, I can invest in its future (including upcoming premium features, if all goes well). In some sense, donating to Reddit is extremely capitalistic. Contrast with charity, which is non-capitalistic and much "better" in the sense of ultimate moral good, but where I'm never likely to see my $5 again or even hear how it was used.
  • zyb09 16y ago
    ah yeah good ol' "but Africa" reasoning. You can apply that logic to almost everything. Sorry but why don't you return your freshly bought iPhone and donate the money to charity's? And do you really need a car, can't you ride your bike? Do we really need Reddit if we could buy food in Africa instead? Maybe that's a little harsh, but we spend money EVERY friggn day on things that could be invested in Africas problems. Making this point leads to nowhere and Africa's problems are far more complex anyway. There's defiantly nothing wrong in donating a few bucks to Reddit. (also pacifism is neither extreme nor wrong)
• lvecsey 16y ago
  Can any savings be had by committing to a data center instead of paying the amazon hosting rates? I fear if they're at yet another crunch point, the next one will be too much. Granted the pressure to "do more with less" is always there, but something has to give.
  • jedberg 16y ago
    We actually moved from a datacenter to EC2. The problem is we all live in the Bay Area, where data centers cost a lot of money. We can't afford to hire a hand on person in a cheap place, so it turns out EC2 (and other cloud solutions) are just cheaper. Also, one thing that is nice with EC2 is that we can spin up a lot of big iron when we need to absorb new kinds of traffic. I can't do that in my own datacenter.
• ziadbc 16y ago
  Reddit is very loyal to its userbase, but isn't moderating them too much. Thus, it is becoming hard to market toward them because there isn't an easy in for someone offering products. Either they need to shape their audience more, or figure out the right types of products (these may not even exist yet, but I'm sure there are plenty of things redditors want that don't yet exist) I would also look at what people are giving for arbitrary day as an idea for advertisers.
• petercooper 16y ago
  They could accept advertisers from outside the US without using some bizarre legal argument I've never heard from any other company.
  • jedberg 16y ago
    The legal argument isn't that bizarre. :) Our lawyers fear foreign laws and will not deal with them. That being said, we are working on expanding into some of the other English speaking countries.
    • Keyframe 16y ago
      While you're at it, add a 'flag' button to self serving ads. I've seen a couple of ads with comments disabled and no flag, yet when I clicked on them (only a few though) Chrome reported malicious content.
    • petercooper 16y ago
      It's bizarre in the sense that it's a rare problem. I can approach any of a million US sites, give them some money, and put an ad on their site. I can head over to http://buysellads.com/ http://buysellads.com/ and do that right now. Being subjected to foreign laws can't be a huge concern, surely. Contracts for advertising (and, heck, almost any online service) specify the legal jurisdiction that applies to the transaction. If I live in Kazakhstan, buy some ads on a US site, there's not much I can do if I agreed to a US-based contract whether Reddit breaks Kazakhstani law or not.
      • jedberg 16y ago
        The problem is that we aren't just selling ad space. We are running what might be considered an "auction" in some jurisdictions (it isn't in the United States), and that is what the lawyers fear. They want to make sure we won't get dinged for running an illegal auction.
        • petercooper 16y ago
• hotmind 16y ago
  Reddit is user generated content. Without the users, who are the readers and contributers, Reddit wouldn't even exist. And yet they want subscription fees from the very users who carry the website? Reddit have ads plastered prominently on the site, Reddit TV, a 99 cent app, I assume merch (correct me if I'm wrong), free user generated content from a massive hardcore following, and millions of pageviews a day (too lazy to look up the exact number) - and yet they still can't make a go of it? If so, that does not bode well for the rest of us.
• brianwillis 16y ago
  I gladly forked over $10. I can't remember who I'm quoting here, but it comes from someone in the Voluntary Simplicity movement and it really struck a chord with me: >With your money you get to chose what exists in the world. It's one of the the last truly democratic forms of voting. In some ways, consumerism is an unriggable election, with the market deciding (for better or worse - sometimes worse) what is allowed to thrive and what dies. A few people have expressed the opinion that because Reddit is owned by a large corporation, that asking for donations is unjustified. The way I see it, they're creating value, and have a right to ask for payment for that. In exchange for your dollars, you get to see a great community continue existing in the world.
• axod 16y ago
  lipstick.com was always going to be far easier to monetize. (The site Reddit made for Conde Naste before they bought Reddit). Celebs? Gossip? Woman demographics? non techie? Jeez you'd have been able to make millions... http://web.archive.org/web/20071025012630/http://lipstick.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20071025012630/http://lipstick.co... The site seems to have been killed and not used since 2007. Stupidly bad decision IMHO. Even if you stuck up a crappy website on that domain and just sold lipstick it'd probably pay to run Reddit.
  • _pi 16y ago
    To be honest Reddit isn't that techie anymore, reddit's demographics have shifted to teenage and young adult males and girls who are "geeks". Not only that but the default reddits are becoming a cesspool like Digg. Essentially the community had so much Digg hate in the beginning but at least Kevin Rose kept his site running while the demographics shifted.
    • axod 16y ago
      Sure, I think their demographic has shifted away from techie. Now it's anti-consumerist adblock loving pot smokin' gay marriage loving liberals.
      • _pi 16y ago
        I think the rise of humanistic interest sub-reddits with a low knowledge entry barrier killed it.
      • deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]
• zach 16y ago
  I have to say, this looks bad for the whole "users first, revenue later" mantra. Now, admittedly, the founders got paid on the flip. But there are users, and now it's later, so... where is the revenue? I heard this moment described as the "where is the land" moment. The crew has been sailing the ocean for a long time and they're running on slim hope. They grumble, then complain, and finally they confront the captain and say, "You promised us land. Where is the land?!" This doesn't look like a good resolution to the "where is the land" moment. Why decide to plead for cash? It's the business model of last resort. So yeah, this is definitely a cry for help. Unfortunately, it's one that reminds me a lot of the drowning article. I think this is Reddit grabbing its users and trying to climb on top of them.
  • zyb09 16y ago
    This whole mantra was build on being bought by Google anyway.
  • nostrademons 16y ago
    I think this is the "revenue later" part.
    • zach 16y ago
      I strongly doubt it. I can't see a public-media-style "pledge week" as a primary source of revenue for a for-profit company. I think the best outcome would be that this is a one-time weird thing that happened before they found a real revenue model. That wouldn't be unprecedented at all, although every time I can think of, this happens before the founders sell to a large company who can monetize well. For example, I donated to faqs.org when it was just some guy, and now it's owned by some site aggregator I've never heard of. Which is fine with me, because I just wanted to keep it around. But assuming this works spectacularly, doesn't this just make Reddit completely illiquid? How can you go about selling a company based on revenues that are primarily free-will gifts? What would you sell, a share of profits from people just giving the company money? And what would you tell your donating customers who have zero ownership? Maybe that's all okay, or maybe I don't get it -- is there some way for this to succeed that I'm missing here?
• deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
• ww520 16y ago
  Time to hire some business folks? Really, now it is not the time to talk about server expansion or more page views. The highest priority now is monetization. They need to come up with ways to get paid sufficiently to expand. Here are the things they can do: 1. Place more ads. I don't buy the notion that many reddit users run ad-blockers. Even half of them do, you still get 140M/month page views. 2. Get Google AdSense, to place content-related ads. 3. Sponsorship. Have companies to sponsor some subreddits and add companies promotion and events. 4. Paid submission, clearly marked so. Company ad and product/service announcement can go there. E.g. all the webhosting promotion deals going on now. 5. Create some deal/coupon/onsales subreddits. Have companies feed them and pay for them. Rather than just having user-generated content, have companies generated content as well, and get paid for them. 6. CPA revenue sharing. Give redditers some percentage of discount when they go to a merchant's site to purchase something from a reddit link. Reddit takes a cut. It's a win-win-win setup, merchant sells a product minus the marketing cost which becomes the redditers' discount and reddit's share. There are so many ways to skin this cat. They are sitting on a good problem to have. Why are they fumbling on this?
  • mkramlich 16y ago
    Yes I think they have a Maserati problem. Or rather, they could have a Maserati problem if they simply flipped the right switch, given the high traffic and community/fanbase they now have. Most startups would love to have their problem.
  • msmith 16y ago
    If you read the whole article, you'll see that they're considering paid subscriptions.
  • jedberg 16y ago
    Thanks for the suggestions. Some we have tried, others we would like to, and some are totally new. The big problem is that we spend most of our time just keeping the site up and don't have time to focus on these ideas, and Conde is unwilling to invest. We're hoping the reddit gold money gives us the flexibility to bring in the talent we need to make some of those ideas happen.
• deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
• leftnode 16y ago
  Do what incredibly successful SomethingAwful does: it's pretty much free to browse and read (but saturated with ads) or you can pay $10 for life, and rid yourself of most ads and post content. It removes 99% of the shitheads and creates a great community. You can also buy upgrades like an avatar, no-ads, a custom title, personal messages, etc.
  • qwzybug 16y ago
    SA also wields the banhammer with wild abandon. For people who don't toe the line, the $10 turns into a subscription. The army of mods needed to keep the revolving door going is large, but I think they like their jobs. Unfortunately the last several years of SA have revealed that this model doesn't really scale either, at least with regards to maintaining a vibrant community and avoiding the Digg effect. I think they should have started raising the rates about 2004.
• rufugee 16y ago
  I'm not sure what the problems are, and I agree with others' sentiment that they need to focus on business and advertising. Still, as someone who in the last few years has bought into the Rails explanation of scaling (sure, ruby is slow, but you can scale horizontally with more servers after you're sold and have bajillions to spend), I wonder if this is a bad sign for startups using dynamic languages. I've played around with www.playframework.org, and in my tests it was a LOT faster than ruby, while offering many of the same benefits as Rails. I know Reddit is written in Python with Pylons, but I wonder if all those CPU cycles they sacrificed by using Python instead of Java wouldn't come in handy now?
  • starkfist 16y ago
    Yeah, the trick about that is that servers aren't really as cheap as everyone says. Also, with horizontal scaling you spend more money elsewhere: on stuff the programmers usually don't know shit about, like big-iron loadbalancers, and on systems administration. So when someone says "hardware is cheap, programmers are expensive" be aware that they are forgetting about systems administrators who are often more expensive than programmers. I was recently involved with a project where we were able to reduce our server costs by an order of magnitude by switching from ruby to java.
    • brunoc 16y ago
      I'd love to hear more about this ruby -> java transition if you're willing to share.
      • code_duck 16y ago
        Generally, the steps are 1> rewrite your Ruby code in Java
        • starkfist 16y ago
          Yeah, what he said... sort of. First we tried just smushing everything into JRuby, but that was a mess. We then split the app into a bunch of services, instead of one monolithic rails beast. Each new service is a simple java app. It was a gradual process, taking about 7 months.
• pier0 16y ago
  "Corporations aren't run like charities", but apparently they don't mind asking for some.
• adammichaelc 16y ago
  What I would do... Tier 1: $36 a year to get rid of ads and get a silver badge Tier 2: $72 a year to get rid of ads and get a gold badge and be mentioned on a "featured supporters" page Tier 3: $144 a year to get all of the above (except make it a platinum badge) and become a "platinum-supporter," which would entitle you to discounts to Conde Naste events, pulications, etc. Conde Naste owns Wired, the New Yorker, etc, so the discounts could be pretty cool with a bit of creativity.
• asimjalis 16y ago
  "Our four engineers are working full time just to keep things going. Perhaps we're doing it wrong: there might be ways to optimize our code, or technologies that could allow us to work more efficiently, but we're too busy to investigate these things, or to migrate to the ones that look promising. It becomes a vicious cycle." If Reddit had not abandoned Lisp for Python, could the team have dodged this vicious cycle?
  • ciupicri 16y ago
    I think that they would have dodged it by not existing or being so big.
  • tomjen3 16y ago
    No, not the way they where doing it. Today you can choose between Clozure lisp or Clojure, both of which runs the same on the different platforms and both of which are free. Back then, the only way they could have pulled it of would be to use something like Lispworks or Franz lisp, both of which are super nice technologies that would be awesome to work with but they are also extreemly expensive (and I have no idea how they scale).
• barredo 16y ago
  Someone mentioned give free @reddit.com email addresses (even if not a full mailbox, just a redirect or alias to other email account). I will pay for that.
• nhnifong 16y ago
  Reddit I will pay you whatever it takes to keep those nasty adds off of your website. Please do not sell our attention to people who do not deserve it.
• DotSauce 16y ago
  Brilliant tactic encouraging members to set their own donation amount. I imagine Reddit will receive significantly more donations and overall totals than had they set donation structure.
• drawkbox 16y ago
  It will have to be many pieces not just a subscription...having to be careful though for the community, so create more... - reddit game site with reddit comments and upvoting integrated into the site like kongregate, game sites can pull in some better revenue (indie game competitions, stats, leaderboards etc). - reddit book or movie club where you take the revenue of the amazon lead or other store leads. - make money off the porn communities, tier the submission process (lots of great companies get some funding from porn and noone will complain here). - prominent donation link or pay it forward like flattr. - deals for sponsorship such as takeovers on subreddits for movies, games, etc. - deals for reddit flash mobs for buying a product or service at once or with code (queue people ready to buy a product, then find a retailer ready to give 10% off for redditors - could work with book/movie clubs above and digital goods like steam games). - ... If you can relate everything back to your core feature (awesome community) then it may just work.
• jcnnghm 16y ago
  With the number of page views you all are getting, why don't you bring on a developer on a commission basis to really focus on driving revenue. I'm sure you can find an ambition, business minded developer that you could give a percentage of the increase in revenue to, who would be willing to work for free to get things going. There is definitely money being left on the table, and structuring it in this way could allow you to avoid getting shot down by the people in charge, while bringing in more people, and increasing the revenue, which will ultimately allow you all to increase the operating budget. I'd definitely be interested in something like this, and I'm sure many other people would be too.
• bryanh 16y ago
  Why not create a sub-community for subscribers only? I mean, normal users see subscriber and normal users posts but subscribers optionally only see other subscribers. Maybe this would create a tighter knit, higher quality group. As beaten as this dead horse is, we all know Reddit is infected with memes and nonsense galore, that's why many of use have graduated to HN.
• exit 16y ago
  make expenses completely transparent (+hosting +salaries -advertising). prominently display this per-month quota as some kind of health-bar, and next to that a payment button. if the health-bar drops below x%, the rest of the site disappears. there is no profit in this model. let the users finance their own addiction.
  • thinkalone 16y ago
    I'd love to see the "health-bar" implemented - reddit is absurdly secretive about what is going wrong behind the scenes and seemingly unwilling to allow users to help. The site has suffered for lack of transparency and community management.
• rdl 16y ago
  Is there any actual synergy at all with the rest of Conde Nast? Would it make sense for Reddit to work with some P.E. people to buy themselves out, and make a venture investment in improving the site?
  • JabavuAdams 16y ago
    Why would anyone make a venture investment in some guys who just admitted that they can't think of how to make money on 280M uniques? Reddit was (perhaps not intentionally) built to flip. Mission accomplished.
    • rdl 16y ago
      Invest in the 280M uniques, not in the guys. Put the "Francis M. H. White of Monetization" in as CEO, let the founders be involved in other roles (they're great at building a community and at "ghetto" engineering). That it is weak sauce now just means you could buy it cheaper. If I had $5-10mm (+100% debt) sitting around and nothing better to do with my life for 2-4 years, I'd be seriously tempted to make an offer to Conde Nast.
• koenbok 16y ago
  FYI, we tried to buy a self serve Reddit ad a month ago but it wouldn't accept any of our cards. Tried to contact you guys but never heard anything back. No hard feelings, we just went with other advertising. But if this happens more then incidentally then you guys could easily be missing out on multiple 1k/month advertising deals by not offering a way to contact someone on the team.
• nphase 16y ago
  Here's a silly/naive suggestion from someone who only casually visits reddit (read: not often to know exactly what is causing the downtime): why not make the source code behind the more problematic functions available and let us make suggestions? If not source code, then detailed descriptions? I'd be interested in helping optimize your pain points, as I'm sure many here and on reddit are. Yes, you'll get quite a ton of trash from people who have no clue by doing this, but maybe you'll get some smart pointers in a way that doesn't require you to get a new engineer spun up in six months (which, IMHO, seems far too long for a web product)
  • stanleydrew 16y ago
    Well except for the anti-cheating parts the reddit source is open: code.reddit.com.
  • lambda 16y ago
    You do realize the Reddit source code is available, right? http://code.reddit.com/ http://code.reddit.com/
    • nphase 16y ago
      Ha! I do now. Awesome.
• pclark 16y ago
  $2 / mo: reddit gold badge $6 / mo: + reddit.com email redirector $12 / mo: reddit username appears in different colour on pages. asking for one off donations isn't a business, you want predictable revenues. I'd pay $12/mo for reddit. I think Reddit should contact a PE firm and do a buy out. They can't monetize because they don't have the resources.
• c1sc0 16y ago
  Open up self-serve ads for the rest of the world? I wanted to buy ads but I couldn't because reddit is not processing non-US credit cards.
• scorpion032 16y ago
  Move to AppEngine. Seriously. I know the pain these guys are going thro sys-admin-ing the system. The memcache clears out, The cassandra's fail, the fault reporting system breaks. The new twitter fail whale. Let the pros do the sys admin thing. Like Ted Zuiba says it, it not that they are not intelligent, the kind of problems that occur at large scales, they just don't have enough experience to know, anticipate and have preventive measures in place. They should really talk to Google, to move their data on to the Bigtable and work on adding features.
• Conservationist 16y ago
  Quantity over quality. Reddit expanded rapidly and exchanged its audience of programmers, writers and creators for the 4chan crowd, who are working entry-level jobs and specialize in buying nothing. It's great for SEO, but useless for advertising revenue.
• binspace 16y ago
  Get rid of downvoting (to fight the pervasive groupthink) and I'll consider joining reddit again.
  • mclin 16y ago
    Huge urge to downvote this comment...
    • binspace 16y ago
      Why, because you disagree with it?
      • deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]
      • binspace 16y ago
        That's the problem. It's so easy to censor differing opinions instead of engaging in a reasonable discussion over the differences.
      • mclin 16y ago
        Irony...
        • binspace 16y ago
          Aah ;-)
• alexqgb 16y ago
  What value, if any, can information from Reddit be used by Conde Nast to drive their larger business (i.e. selling ads)? Not knowing anything about the deal (but knowing a bit about Conde's general disdain for the web) I'm still surprised that your biggest problem is an ad-sales framework. At the same time, I always assumed that Reddit was one of the most future-forward components in Conde's portfolio, and that it could provide as much if not more intelligence value to its owners than it could via direct revenue. This are totally off the cuff responses. I could easily be wrong about everything.