6 ms·

Condé Nast finally throws Reddit a bone, new hires coming

91 points by logicalmoron 16y ago

fourply 16y ago
i am trying to be generally optimistic, but it seems pretty likely that Conde Nast is going to eventually want to monetize the reddit community in ways that no one will like. without some sort of payoff at the end of the road, i can't imagine why they'd agree to additional hires.
- tesseract 16y ago
  CN could start by helping reddit sell their banner ad inventory... it's got to be less than 1% of the time that I see a real ad, rather than reddit self-promotions or something for another CN property running in that slot.
  - presidentender 16y ago
    "Something for another CN property" could well be the payoff.
    - tesseract 16y ago
      True although the number of those seems to be, if anything, decreasing.
cryptoz 16y ago
It doesn't sound like CN has really changed their attitude much. The news in this blog post is fantastic! But it sounds like the money is coming from Gold subscribers, not CN. Reddit is either already bigger than Wired - or probably will be soon...they have > 1 billion pageviews / month. It's totally crazy that they run the site with about 5 people. I've been there for almost five years, and I have to say I've loved every minute of it. Back then it was smaller and nerdier, and now it's all big and popular but you can still find the same cozy space in the smaller communities (/r/coding, /r/compsci, for example).
- cagenut 16y ago
  pageviews aren't what matter anymore, UV/month is. comscore's january numbers just came out this morning. Wired droped 38% from 9.4 to 5.9 million. In one month. Hopefully for their sake thats a javascript screw up. reddit rose 11% from 1.0 to 1.1 million. Again, in one month. so if you were to over-extrapolate here you could say that reddit will overtake wired maybe late this year, but as it stands now wired is >6x bigger a media property.
  - SystemOut 16y ago
    I think it depends on the kind of web-site you are running more than anything as to which metrics are important. Just like in finance, depending on the business model, different metrics are tracked (e.g. free cash flow, revenue, etc.). Plus, hardly ever is a single metric important. Sites will look at page views for new/existing visitors, bounce rates for new visitors, time on site, etc. depending on their goals. What this tells you, though, is that if they are only seeing 1.1 million unique visitors a month that those visitors account for 1,000 page views a month which is a lot. And that's the average! I bet a lot of sites would love to have that number.
    - mrkurt 16y ago
      There are definitely more stats sites care about, but question number one from CPM ad buyers is universally "what are your uniques?" They care about the specific demographics of those uniques too, but when they're doing branding (vs conversion based advertising) they really care mostly about how many distinct sets of eyeballs they can address.
  - citricsquid 16y ago
    How do UVs matter more now, for advertisers?
    - redorb 16y ago
      I would say showing your ad to more unique people vs the same person over and over again would be where the new value of Uniques comes into play; of course YMMV.
wildmXranat 16y ago
Hmm, I wonder if this announcement comes on the heels of momentum where users are not renewing the gold subscriptions. I'm not sure of that and I'm purely speculating, but I think the average initial subscription amount was about $10 and those would expiring around now. Just guessing. This sort of action would be a good way for CN to rope back in any doubters that their $$ will benefit the site. edit: I know they indeed beefed up investments in hardware and I was referring to hiring more devs.
- tesseract 16y ago
  That or maybe the users are renewing, giving reddit some confidence to make a long term commitment by hiring, rather than spending the subscription money on hardware.
dhughes 16y ago
Reddit has been down for two days maybe that was the kick in the pants they needed.
- mkr-hn 16y ago
  Reddit is down half the time because people flocked to it when Digg went south. Any team would struggle to keep up with that kind of growth. http://siteanalytics.compete.com/digg.com+reddit.com/ http://siteanalytics.compete.com/digg.com+reddit.com/ A sudden influx of 100k people overnight is not easy to manage. The number on the visits graph is even more substantial.
  - hayhayhay 16y ago
    Their architecture is flawed, given the platform and stack they chose. Not only is it easily solvable, the solution would be cheaper than their current 'throw more VMs at a bad architecture' approach.
  - dhughes 16y ago
    Well not half but quite a bit since the digg diaspora, but lately it's been especially bad lately.
  - hessenwolf 16y ago
    Well, some of us were knocked on to hacker news as a result. It's like a cashflow waterfall. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securitization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securitization
    - leon_ 16y ago
      Oh, that explains much.
kprobst 16y ago
I wish there was a way for these guys to disengage from the Death Star and go independent. It doesn't seem like living inside CN has a ton of advantages anyway. Maybe the ultimate Reddit community project would be to raise a large amount of capital to buy the site from CN.
- lbrandy 16y ago
  > I wish there was a way for these guys to disengage from the Death Star and go independent. I've wondered the same thing before. Is there any precedent for such a thing? Here's a dumb way to do it: find enough funding and convince, oh, half of reddit to join the new venture. It is, after all, mostly open source. Heh.
- 100k 16y ago
  > It doesn't seem like living inside CN has a ton of advantages anyway. It did for the founders!
- amadiver 16y ago
  I used to work for the internet arm of Condé in NYC in the mid aughts. The cafeteria was amazing; they'd have some big-deal chef in each week to work a lunch shift (though people would usually smoke instead of eating). The women there were also incredibly attractive -- it helped having Vogue in the same building. I have no idea what their San Francisco offices are like, but if they're anything like New York, it makes working there almost worth it. ... almost...
- sachinag 16y ago
  Ben Huh has offered to negotiate with Conde Nast for Reddit. He also has $30 million in new investor cash that he's sitting on. Also, this: http://www.itworld.com/offbeat/134411/animated-take-cheezburger-networks-30m-vc-round http://www.itworld.com/offbeat/134411/animated-take-cheezbur...
  - honeycrisp 16y ago
    Yeah, but being owned by Ben Huh wouldn't be any better than being owned by Conde Nast. It would probably be far worse.
KMStraub 16y ago
This is indeed great news, but I can't believe what CN has done to this company. Well, I actually can because I worked at CN for 4 years and saw extremely little investment in long-term digital strategy. There were a lot of tricks being thought of to try to get an edge, but they still have too many print dinosaurs who are terrified of losing their jobs calling the shots. And I'm not saying these print dinosaurs couldn't very easily evolve and learn what they need to learn and be what the publisher needs to stay afloat. I'm saying there's this cloud of fear looming over everyone's heads there that's suffocating any potential for innovation.
iamelgringo 16y ago
The engineering team at Reddit manages 250M pageviews per engineer. That has to be some kind of record. Has any other site ever hit the Alexa 100 with only 4 engineers? Kudos.
- mdonahoe 16y ago
  Perhaps Craigslist? 30 employees and 20 billion pageviews/month. Not clear how many of those people are engineers. http://www.craigslist.org/about/factsheet http://www.craigslist.org/about/factsheet pg makes reference to it in this essay http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html
- moe 16y ago
  I find it amusing how many people still assume that a site with many page views somehow needs to have a big engineering team behind it. Yes, 1 billion page views is a relatively serious load, technically. But there's not much difference between a small team building the software to handle it and a huge enterprise department doing the same. In fact, the small team will often produce better results. When given enough motivation, money and coffee.
- taken11 16y ago
  thepiratebay?
- khafra 16y ago
  Plentyoffish claims to get 500M pageviews per month, and is run by just the one guy. I can't speak for the taste and discernment of the people who visited that site 500M times, though.
nbpoole 16y ago
...and Reddit is currently down (well, in emergency read-only mode). :(
- forwardslash 16y ago
  Where do you go when Reddit is down?

91 points by logicalmoron 16y ago

i am trying to be generally optimistic, but it seems pretty likely that Conde Nast is going to eventually want to monetize the reddit community in ways that no one will like. without some sort of payoff at the end of the road, i can't imagine why they'd agree to additional hires.

tesseract 16y ago
CN could start by helping reddit sell their banner ad inventory... it's got to be less than 1% of the time that I see a real ad, rather than reddit self-promotions or something for another CN property running in that slot.
- presidentender 16y ago
  "Something for another CN property" could well be the payoff.
  - tesseract 16y ago
    True although the number of those seems to be, if anything, decreasing.

cryptoz 16y ago

It doesn't sound like CN has really changed their attitude much. The news in this blog post is fantastic! But it sounds like the money is coming from Gold subscribers, not CN. Reddit is either already bigger than Wired - or probably will be soon...they have > 1 billion pageviews / month. It's totally crazy that they run the site with about 5 people. I've been there for almost five years, and I have to say I've loved every minute of it. Back then it was smaller and nerdier, and now it's all big and popular but you can still find the same cozy space in the smaller communities (/r/coding, /r/compsci, for example).

cagenut 16y ago
pageviews aren't what matter anymore, UV/month is. comscore's january numbers just came out this morning. Wired droped 38% from 9.4 to 5.9 million. In one month. Hopefully for their sake thats a javascript screw up. reddit rose 11% from 1.0 to 1.1 million. Again, in one month. so if you were to over-extrapolate here you could say that reddit will overtake wired maybe late this year, but as it stands now wired is >6x bigger a media property.
- SystemOut 16y ago
  I think it depends on the kind of web-site you are running more than anything as to which metrics are important. Just like in finance, depending on the business model, different metrics are tracked (e.g. free cash flow, revenue, etc.). Plus, hardly ever is a single metric important. Sites will look at page views for new/existing visitors, bounce rates for new visitors, time on site, etc. depending on their goals. What this tells you, though, is that if they are only seeing 1.1 million unique visitors a month that those visitors account for 1,000 page views a month which is a lot. And that's the average! I bet a lot of sites would love to have that number.
  - mrkurt 16y ago
    There are definitely more stats sites care about, but question number one from CPM ad buyers is universally "what are your uniques?" They care about the specific demographics of those uniques too, but when they're doing branding (vs conversion based advertising) they really care mostly about how many distinct sets of eyeballs they can address.
- citricsquid 16y ago
  How do UVs matter more now, for advertisers?
  - redorb 16y ago
    I would say showing your ad to more unique people vs the same person over and over again would be where the new value of Uniques comes into play; of course YMMV.

wildmXranat 16y ago

Hmm, I wonder if this announcement comes on the heels of momentum where users are not renewing the gold subscriptions. I'm not sure of that and I'm purely speculating, but I think the average initial subscription amount was about $10 and those would expiring around now. Just guessing. This sort of action would be a good way for CN to rope back in any doubters that their $$ will benefit the site. edit: I know they indeed beefed up investments in hardware and I was referring to hiring more devs.

tesseract 16y ago
That or maybe the users are renewing, giving reddit some confidence to make a long term commitment by hiring, rather than spending the subscription money on hardware.

dhughes 16y ago

Reddit has been down for two days maybe that was the kick in the pants they needed.

mkr-hn 16y ago
Reddit is down half the time because people flocked to it when Digg went south. Any team would struggle to keep up with that kind of growth. http://siteanalytics.compete.com/digg.com+reddit.com/ http://siteanalytics.compete.com/digg.com+reddit.com/ A sudden influx of 100k people overnight is not easy to manage. The number on the visits graph is even more substantial.
- hayhayhay 16y ago
  Their architecture is flawed, given the platform and stack they chose. Not only is it easily solvable, the solution would be cheaper than their current 'throw more VMs at a bad architecture' approach.
- dhughes 16y ago
  Well not half but quite a bit since the digg diaspora, but lately it's been especially bad lately.
- hessenwolf 16y ago
  Well, some of us were knocked on to hacker news as a result. It's like a cashflow waterfall. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securitization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securitization
  - leon_ 16y ago
    Oh, that explains much.

kprobst 16y ago

I wish there was a way for these guys to disengage from the Death Star and go independent. It doesn't seem like living inside CN has a ton of advantages anyway. Maybe the ultimate Reddit community project would be to raise a large amount of capital to buy the site from CN.

lbrandy 16y ago
> I wish there was a way for these guys to disengage from the Death Star and go independent. I've wondered the same thing before. Is there any precedent for such a thing? Here's a dumb way to do it: find enough funding and convince, oh, half of reddit to join the new venture. It is, after all, mostly open source. Heh.
100k 16y ago
> It doesn't seem like living inside CN has a ton of advantages anyway. It did for the founders!
amadiver 16y ago
I used to work for the internet arm of Condé in NYC in the mid aughts. The cafeteria was amazing; they'd have some big-deal chef in each week to work a lunch shift (though people would usually smoke instead of eating). The women there were also incredibly attractive -- it helped having Vogue in the same building. I have no idea what their San Francisco offices are like, but if they're anything like New York, it makes working there almost worth it. ... almost...
sachinag 16y ago
Ben Huh has offered to negotiate with Conde Nast for Reddit. He also has $30 million in new investor cash that he's sitting on. Also, this: http://www.itworld.com/offbeat/134411/animated-take-cheezburger-networks-30m-vc-round http://www.itworld.com/offbeat/134411/animated-take-cheezbur...
- honeycrisp 16y ago
  Yeah, but being owned by Ben Huh wouldn't be any better than being owned by Conde Nast. It would probably be far worse.

KMStraub 16y ago

This is indeed great news, but I can't believe what CN has done to this company. Well, I actually can because I worked at CN for 4 years and saw extremely little investment in long-term digital strategy. There were a lot of tricks being thought of to try to get an edge, but they still have too many print dinosaurs who are terrified of losing their jobs calling the shots. And I'm not saying these print dinosaurs couldn't very easily evolve and learn what they need to learn and be what the publisher needs to stay afloat. I'm saying there's this cloud of fear looming over everyone's heads there that's suffocating any potential for innovation.

iamelgringo 16y ago

The engineering team at Reddit manages 250M pageviews per engineer. That has to be some kind of record. Has any other site ever hit the Alexa 100 with only 4 engineers? Kudos.

mdonahoe 16y ago
Perhaps Craigslist? 30 employees and 20 billion pageviews/month. Not clear how many of those people are engineers. http://www.craigslist.org/about/factsheet http://www.craigslist.org/about/factsheet pg makes reference to it in this essay http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html
moe 16y ago
I find it amusing how many people still assume that a site with many page views somehow needs to have a big engineering team behind it. Yes, 1 billion page views is a relatively serious load, technically. But there's not much difference between a small team building the software to handle it and a huge enterprise department doing the same. In fact, the small team will often produce better results. When given enough motivation, money and coffee.
taken11 16y ago
thepiratebay?
khafra 16y ago
Plentyoffish claims to get 500M pageviews per month, and is run by just the one guy. I can't speak for the taste and discernment of the people who visited that site 500M times, though.

nbpoole 16y ago

...and Reddit is currently down (well, in emergency read-only mode). :(

forwardslash 16y ago
Where do you go when Reddit is down?