5 ms·

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.
  • nailer 16y ago
    They should integrate their ad platform with their static image platform - ie, all logos, thumbnails, and ads are served from the same dir on the same host, perhaps with similar filenames. Adblock would still work, but ad-rippers be reduced to a text only site.
    • axod 16y ago
      It's trivial to get past adblock, but the fact that users use adblock means they're not the type of user you can monetize easily. Getting past adblock doesn't really help. Changing the userbase does, but it's a bit late for that :/
  • vaksel 16y ago
    if your audience is hard to monetize, then you go for CPM advertising. That way you get big name brands that want to raise awareness about their products rather than convert users to buy a widget. This way they'd get more or less guaranteed $3-4 CPM...the fact that reddit has 4 engineers and 0 sales people goes to show that they aren't even trying to monetize the site.
    • axod 16y ago
      If you put traditional (well paying) ads on Reddit, I think the userbase would revolt scream etc etc.
      • jbooth 16y ago
        They'd scream, and there'd be a rash of "this sucks, I'm quitting" diaries and then like 5 people who were going to quit anyways would actually leave. Look at their site, 2 total ads on the main page, one per comment page. They could bump that to 5 per page without breaking a sweat. There's their revenue.
        • vaksel 16y ago
          wouldn't even have to do that, right now their ads suck...they are either "hey pay us $20-$30 to advertise on reddit", thanks for not using adblock, buying some reddit schwag, yay reddit, and once in a while you see Amazon or some anime shows ads. that's it...why can't they go to Honda and get them to pay them money to promote buying a Civic? or Coca Cola? etc etc/