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Reddit's visitors skyrocket in 2012 with 37 billion page views
- 6thSigma 14y agoI wonder how Reddit will monetize in the future. They have been pretty anti-advertisements for the longest time (they have some of the least invasive ads on the net IMO). I read awhile back that they were losing millions of dollars a year. They really need to increase the features of Reddit Gold for that to become a viable option for users rather than looked at as a "donation."
- criley 14y agoSources? I'm curious, and I hadn't heard that they were losing money. Seems silly that they'd be added people on a regular basis if they were doing so poorly.
- 6thSigma 14y agohttp://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/12v8y3/now_is_the_time_to_invest_in_gold/c6yfbuh http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/12v8y3/now_is_the_time... ^ Reddit`s CEO.
- coopdog 14y agoInteresting, it looks like they're trying to become app.net and not twitter, for all the right reasons.
- FreeKill 14y agoWhat they should do is do it the same as Wikipedia. I'm not sure what Reddit's costs are like, but if they did a donation drive where it was a choice of donating or more ads, I bet the community would chip in.
- srik 14y agoThey have a "Gold" feature that does something like this. http://www.reddit.com/gold/about http://www.reddit.com/gold/about
- FreeKill 14y agoYeah, I think they gotta do more than that though. Go straight up like Jimmy Wales and just say we need X dollars, if you want reddit to stay up. Maybe give reddit gold as a bonus to everyone who donates. The biggest problem with Reddit Gold is it seems like a feature you can live without (especially if you use reddit enhancement suite). They don't emphasize enough that it's a donation to keep the site going.
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- petercooper 14y agoTotally random idea, but maybe they could offer support for paid, private sub-Reddits and take a cut. There are a few I'd pay (a small amount) for.
- fruchtose 14y agoThe userbase would balk. Private subreddits are already a feature. Asking users to pay money for something they currently use for free would tick off power users who have ungodly influence among the users. I think I get what you're talking about, but Reddit is not like Github enough to pull that off.
- rolleiflex 14y agoThey do have that feature and it's free.
- hayksaakian 14y ago
- shubhamjain 14y agowhy should anyone avoid ads so much? I dont think a ad or two will degrade user experience.
- VLM 14y agoTwo obvious monetizing ideas that would be more or less community compatible: 1) you sign up for reddit gold, you get https access to the "nice" servers that have very low load, low latency, tons of BW, cached (fast) image links ... Non-donators get "the best effort swamp" which doesn't work any worse than it does now, but who doesn't want a faster UI? 2) data mining. Hey "big rich corporation" for only $1000 (a month?) I'll send you a detailed monthly report of what "the internet" REALLY says about you, or your industry segment, or the world in general. Presumably your PR people will be fascinated. You could hire a couple interns to slowly search via the UI and/or google but we have the raw DB data ready to automatically mine and we can summarize it for you far cheaper and more effectively than you could by yourself.
- Dave9k 14y agoData mining has been mentioned before on Reddit. Admins aren't keen. http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/15kz08/til_reddit_is_owned_by_advance_publications_which/c7neejg http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/15kz08/til_re...
- gdubs 14y agoOriginal post: http://blog.reddit.com/2012/12/top-posts-of-year-and-best-of-2012.html?m=1 http://blog.reddit.com/2012/12/top-posts-of-year-and-best-of...
- conradfr 14y agoI wonder how Imgur scales, as it is the most popular image host on Reddit (by large).
- citricsquid 14y agoWonder no more! Here's a talk Alan did about scaling at AWS re:invent http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gS91dyl8LsQ#t=1400s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gS91dyl8LsQ#t=1400s (Related: imgur has more image views than reddit has page views, but their stats page (http://imgur.com/stats http://imgur.com/stats) isn't updating at the moment. Also imgur is no longer just an image host for reddit, they've expanded into being their own "social" website)
- ceol 14y agoIt was never just an image host for reddit. MrGrim made posts on both reddit and Digg hoping to entice users from both sites to use it as a replacement for Photobucket/ImageShack.
- tokenadult 14y agoThe article reports: "The huge increase in traffic means Reddit has had to add more servers and other equipment and bring in more staff to maintain its site. This growth has forced it to spend money to keep up with the flow, while also promoting paid subscriptions and advertising." So I wonder now with all the eyeballs visiting Reddit, how many are bringing along revenue for Reddit, and is there any prospect of Reddit gaining enough earnings (profit after expenses) to reward Condé Nast's investment in buying Reddit with a reasonable rate of return? What are the latest hard numbers on that issue? The Reddit comment kindly linked in an earlier comment on this HN thread http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/12v8y3/now_is_the_time_to_invest_in_gold/c6yfbuh http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/12v8y3/now_is_the_time... says explicitly, "Actually, reddit is NOT one of the most profitable sites on the web at all. "In fact, we are not profitable. "This is because increased traffic results in more server usage, which primarily increases costs, not revenue. In theory advertising revenue should/could scale with traffic, but since we never tried very hard to sell our advertising inventory, we only run ads on a relatively small percentage of our pages and they do not cover our costs. When Obama comes to 'chill on the weekends,' that increases costs, not revenue." P.S. The comments from other redditors on that thread from Reddit's CEO yishan show how difficult it will be for Reddit to build more monetization into its user culture.
- latinohere 14y agoSounds incompetent to me in their part. If Facebook can be profitable why can't reddit?
- Centigonal 14y agoFacebook is profitable at the expense of its user base. Reddit is taking a longer view, in part because of the demographic that uses their service and in part due to what happened to Digg.
- adventured 14y agoGiven Reddit is 7 years old, it's a dangerous gamble they're taking in not developing some kind of sustainable business model, one that provides cover for disasters that inevitably hit. Obviously Conde may choose to provide for them perpetually, but that's extremely unlikely. Then again, maybe they're at a large enough scale now to fully run off the Wiki model. More power to them if that's the case and Conde is ok with it.
- lucian303 14y agoToo bad the signal to noise ratio is so horrible. Not to mention the addiction / anti-productivity factor. I still love Reddit. I quit because I love it.
- wmeredith 14y agoReddit is a lot like Twitter (Twitter is who you follow) in that Reddit is what you subscribe to. It's pretty easy to kill the noise.
- alessandroc 14y agonot so hard to do when you're basically a porn forum.
- vividmind 14y agohttp://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/reddit.com# http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/reddit.com#
- zipop 14y agoNot to be offensive but advertising on Reddit is basically trolling for cheapskates. Sure you may get a little traffic but they don't buy anything. I know from experience.
- bane 14y agoFor fun I wonder what they'd make if they just put one advertisement per page from Google's ad network on each pageview. There's enough textual content on each page for Google to probably provide relatively targeted ads.
- x3sphere 14y agoWhy not show AdSense ads to visitors that click on through Google? Would be surprised if this doesn't cover their costs, and it would not affect return visitors for the most part.