12 ms·

Can Reddit Grow Up?

141 points by digisth 12y ago

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- corpselord420 12y ago
  hur hur yes god forbid a victim of sexual harassment seek reprimand
beefsack 12y ago
Perhaps a good way to monetise without alienating their core users would be to only advertise on the default subs. The vast majority of users are there, including the less technical users who might be more likely to actually consume the ads instead of ignoring or blocking them. Another idea which I saw the Whirlpool forums do in Australia is to only advertise to those who aren't logged in. If the sub-communities continue to thrive I can't see Reddit fade into obscurity any time soon.
- mfenniak 12y ago
  I would've thought the opposite. The default subs have large numbers of subscribers (of course), but I feel like they don't have strong communities, or specific themes, that would appeal to an advertiser. Like... /r/funny? /r/creepy? /r/DIY? /r/IAmA? What would compel someone to advertise on those? On the other hand, there are a good number of non-default subs that have strong themes that I'm certain advertisers would want to tap into. For example, city-specific subs, or /r/bodyweightfitness (105,212 subscribers), or /r/bicycling (126,713 subscribers). These communities are so specific that advertising seems like it would be more effective in those areas than any other. Of course... it needs to be done in a way that isn't intrusive or damaging, and that's probably a bigger challenge in a smaller community.
  - lelandbatey 12y ago
    Another example: /r/MechanicalKeyboards with 38,000+ subscribers. That's a community just ripe for good advertising.
    - ufo 12y ago
      Are you sure? One would expect that most new product launches or major sales would be linked to by users for free. Additionally, all the major vendors are already linked to in the sidebar wiki posts...
      - lelandbatey 12y ago
        Major vendors, yes. But there are a lot of small run or custom accessories that would sell quite well if they had more exposure. The wiki in the sidebar is good, but what about when a company comes out with a new set of keycaps? Getting that information out can often be iffy, but ads in a major community would make it easy.
    - wisty 12y ago
      Post to /r/MechanicalKeyboards with "I run a Mechanical Keyboard company, AMA", and you'll get an epic thread. Post and ad and it might get 2 comments.
- SnydenBitchy 12y ago
  Given the hair-raising misogyny, racism, and general terribleness for which reddit’s core users are known, you’d think the company might worry less about alienating them.
  - BESebastian 12y ago
    http://killallmen.club/ http://killallmen.club/
alaskamiller 12y ago
I've got my 7 year badge but I don't go back anymore. I'm aged out. The front page doesn't interest me, the memes don't resonate with me, and the reposts don't keep me. It'll keep happening, year after year as most people age out. But year after year more people join up, I'm sure there's a net again. Enough of a momentum that it will just take decades before the decay happens. Radical changes also risk a Digg implosion. Tough nut to crack. They've been taking every trick from the old forum (SomethingAwful, General Mayhem, OffTopic, GaiaOnline) days other than literally charging for membership. Which is always the final cashing out death knell. Common refrain in the past when positing how the community is turning and reducing value the default rah rah answer has always been to hit the edgy subreddits rather than the mainstream ones. That changes the value of the reddit product from a community to community software. My small business projects rely on subreddits for customer service. Give me customization tools and I'll eagerly pay. After all, it's like vBulletin but better and people out of the wazoo for that.
- oblio 12y ago
  There are people who follow the front page? I don't think I could understand this. In my view the value of reddit, as you pointed out, is in the subreddits: somewhat peer reviewed focused forums with a much better interface than the PHP forums of old. And that's where the money is, IMO. Just as you said, offering enterprisey features for them could rake in a ton of cash.
- yzzxy 12y ago
  Charging for admission has always struck me, at least in the case of SA, as a tactic to guard the community against, essentially, trolls and children. Not as a moneymaking scheme.
  - plorkyeran 12y ago
    SA has also charged for registration for the vast majority of its existence (it was created in 1999 and started charging in 2001), so if it was supposed to be a cash-out before the site died it was a very poorly timed one.
- 12y ago
ef4 12y ago
... said the dying old media company.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- minimaxir 12y ago
  The article was written by Mike Issac, who was ATD/Recode until very recently.
  - SwellJoe 12y ago
    I'd never heard of Re/code (yes, I noticed the embarrassing spelling) until just now. reddit serves billions of pageviews a month. I'm not saying this guy's got nothing interesting to say, but it does seem a little bit condescending to say, "Can reddit grow up?" When reddit has already grown to be one of the most popular sites in the world in a quite short time.
    - cliveowen 12y ago
      >in a quite short time Almost 10 years, the same as YouTube.
archildress 12y ago
Maybe I'm suffering from nostalgia, but the Reddit comments were once a place where some good discussions were shared. Now, they've evolved into contests of wit and cross reference to other posts. In the "frontpage" subreddits, the comments are usually void of meaningful discussion that I remember in the earlier days, although I acknowledge I may be romanticizing it a bit. I think I lost interest in Reddit as a whole when I found HN. Curious if any others had the same experience.
- amwelles 12y ago
  I find that the smaller niche subreddits have that vibe. I subscribe to /r/dogtraining which has loads of valuable information and a ton of helpful, active users.
- snowwrestler 12y ago
  For me the Reddit homepage is entertainment; a guilty pleasure like some people surf TMZ or whatever. But there seem to be some strong communities in some subreddits. /r/personalfinance is one example off the top of my head. AskScience aggressively prunes bad comments and the net result is good discussion (sometimes surrounded by a ton of deleted comments).
- sehr 12y ago
  I think I lost interest in Reddit as a whole when I found HN. Once you start exploring the smaller focused subreddits, discussion gets much better. Although even then, the poop can creep in. Prune your subscriptions brutally. Once a sub goes bad, it doesn't go back. Report spam & inflammatory comments etc.. The community is only as good as its members!
  - droopyEyelids 12y ago
    As a long time Reddit user, I used to see this advice and sigh, because I thought it was bullshit. However, I just wasn't doing it right. Reddit is now a new tool, and you have to learn how to use it. This took me a long time to adapt to. Remember at one point you figured out that you could search youtube for anything and find someone trying to share how they did it? (how do I change the steering pump on a '92 pontiac sunbird) Reddit is like that now.. for any interest or hobby of yours, visit reddit.com/r/hobbyname. Woah. There is a group of people talking about growing kefir. Large caliber air guns. Building decks. Kiln making. It's almost like the new Usenet, in some ways. The difference is we have a huge ball of greatest common denominator shit that you have to figure out how to sidestep.
programminggeek 12y ago
No, it can't without everybody leaving, but they will all leave anyway. My theory is that social news is like the popular club in a major city or a fad in popular culture. You can't predict which will be a hit or for how long. What you can predict is that eventually when enough people show up that it will lose that quality that made it so interesting to begin with, and the people that made it special will move on. This happened with slashdot, digg, and maybe a bit to Hacker News too. I think Reddit's subreddits have made it more of a community of communities instead of one monolithic thing, with a monolithic front page. That certainly helps it have some legs. However, I really don't see how any fad can sustain itself over the long term and anything that is built on social communities is at the whim of the movement of social opinion and interest. People change, get older, and what made something cool for one generation doesn't necessarily work for another generation. There is no reason that Reddit should be popular as opposed to any other community site other than it's where people are congregating right now. In 5 or 10 years, where will people congregate online?
r0s 12y ago
> Also, the content can range anywhere from a quaint series of animal photos to an intense discussion about bitcoin to graphic pornography, all in a single thread. That could spook brands that do not want their ads displayed alongside not-safe-for-work material. Reddit is too adult for ad networks. Can they grow up?
matt-attack 12y ago
It seems that all the critique in the article stem from the advertiser's perspective. "Oh no we can't make money off of the reddit users" the site must be rubbish and outdated. It needs to be more like facebook so that we companies can connect with users".
- mkal_tsr 12y ago
  Yup, it smells to much like, "oh, woe are we advertisers for not being able to exploit users for more money, Reddit needs to change, hmmpf"
firemancoder 12y ago
Why does it need to? Is it self sustaining? Maybe that's all it needs to be. When you try hard to commercialize and squeeze profits, things change and you lose audience. This is exactly what it is limiting the lifespan of Facebook.
- spaldingwell 12y ago
  "This is exactly what it is limiting the lifespan of Facebook" Facebook has over a billion users and has been around for ten years. No other social network can claim both of those things. Don't know if it qualifies as an example of a "limited lifespan"
  - goatman 12y ago
    I think he isn't saying it has had a limited life span. He is saying that it's future lifespan is being limited. Basically, he thinks it has potential to go on much longer than it will.
shirro 12y ago
I don't understand the people who don't like Reddit based on the front page. FFS, Reddit is a platform and the action is in the subreddits. There are some very high quality subreddits with good mods which work as well or better than HN.
- noblethrasher 12y ago
  Case in point: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2bs0rc/ama_feudalism_didnt_exist_the_social_political/ http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2bs0rc/ama_fe...
  - codemaster3000 12y ago
    Holy text walls batman :-). Great read though, great writers in that thread and definitely learned a fair share about feudalism (though probably won't remember it for long...)
  - egypturnash 12y ago
    Man I love AskHistorians. I am proud to have provided a few top-voted answers there on the subject of animation history.
- evan_ 12y ago
  OK, but there's basically no way to know what those are.
  - andrewflnr 12y ago
    Well, no. It makes more sense to think of a subreddit as a separate site that happens to share hosting with a bunch of other sites. Then it's obvious that you just have to search, follow the links, and try them out to see if they're any good.
  - tomjen3 12y ago
    There is almost guaranteed to be a reddit for your interest and it is almost certainly located at reddit.com/r/your_interest.
skizm 12y ago
Ideas for reddit monetization: - Charge $10 a year to keep a subreddit name registered. 500k subreddits, say one half to two thirds pony up, thats $2.5 - 3.3 mil/year. - There is a "trending subreddit" section. Implement a bidding system for a daily "featured subreddit" section similar to this (implement a N day cooldown so larger subs can't buy everyday) - Implement a rev-share system with sub-reddit owners. Paying for a subreddit name could mean no ads, however if the owner wants, they can turn on ads and split the commission with reddit. - Advertise (a little heavier than now) to only non-signed in users. Basically I'm thinking you try and get the subreddit owners to help foot the bill since they are generally the ones getting the most value from the community engine that is reddit.
- codemaster3000 12y ago
  This is a terrible, terrible idea. The mods of each subreddit are what keep the subreddit alive, and subreddits are the building blocks of Reddit. There are mods who put tons and tons of time maintaining the quality of their sub(s), and they are volunteers and don't get paid for any of their work. Asking them to "pony up" their own money would, with no doubt in my mind, drive them away and completely destroy Reddit. You are grossly over-estimating the number of mods who would "help foot the bill," and completely forgetting about how much hatred Reddit would get form the community if this was implemented. If Reddit considered this strategy for monetization, they'd be much better off shooting off their foot, then shooting their other foot.
  - zvrba 12y ago
    > Asking them to "pony up" their own money would, with no doubt in my mind, drive them away and completely destroy Reddit. He wrote nowhere that mods should pay. I as a user would certainly pay $10/yr to keep subreddits I care most about going on.
    - c23gooey 12y ago
      User pays is equally as ridiculous as mod pays. No way as a user i would pay $10/yr when there are multiple sites that will do the same thing as Reddit for free. Im not interested in paying any website for the privilege of expressing my opinion and reading others.
ignostic 12y ago
Reddit wants to be a big company using a site where big companies are the enemy. They could do it, but they need to overhaul the ad system. Having purchased more than a few ads, I can tell you that their platform needs serious help. They're already a step behind because users don't give location or age. To an advertiser who knows the customer, this results in blanketing people you know aren't interested. The real problem is that targeting ads to interested audiences results in very few interactions. When you target to a sub, you have a good chance of showing up on that sub's home page - but no one really goes to a sub home. You need to get people on their front pages. The front page is hyper-competitive: you are bidding against people who are willing to serve ads to ANYONE (ahem, Hipmunk). I've still had some success, but it varies a lot depending on when people buy ads. Their planning tool cannot be relied upon. If reddit were a grown-up advertising company, they'd run it on a cost-per-click bidding basis for link/comment/share/save interactions. Votes would be free to the advertiser, but they'd use recent upvotes and downvotes as a quality score to push ads that people hate off the site and encourage ads people don't mind by giving them a competitive edge. They'd also create more sophisticated targeting options, e.g. people who subscribe to /r/A AND /r/B. Or people who subscribe to /r/A AND either /r/C OR /r/D.
- calbear81 12y ago
  I think they know their ad system sucked so I read somewhere that http://adzerk.com/ http://adzerk.com/ is now handling almost all of their ads after starting with their display ads.
- Vik1ng 12y ago
  but no one really goes to a sub home. But don't you also target the ads at comments sections of that sub?
- ColinCera 12y ago
  >> When you target to a sub, you have a good chance of showing up on that sub's home page - but no one really goes to a sub home. You need to get people on their front pages. Not arguing with your larger points, but this is completely untrue for me — I only use Reddit via subreddit home pages, i.e., I never go to the "front page". I don't even know what a "front page" is. Is that where you just go to http://reddit.com/ http://reddit.com/? I must have visited that once, way back when I first started using Reddit, but since then, never. I have a dozen or so subreddits I'm interested in and when I will occasionally get a whim to check up on one of them, I navigate directly to the subreddit (autocomplete in the browser makes this easier). I also subscribe to RSS feeds for my subreddits. Apparently I'm using Reddit in an unusual way.
steven2012 12y ago
Reddit has the best content for any message style forum I've ever come across. The combination of user voting plus moderation works incredibly. And it's not just a few subreddits, it's a huge swath of them. They've attracted the best community of users that I've ever seen and that positive feedback loop of easy-to-use UI plus great username creates a fantastic site. The top comment is usually useful no matter what the topic is, and I usually never leave disappointed when I read a thread I'm curious about. It would be a shame if they ruined the site a la digg by trying to monetize too aggressively.
tmuir 12y ago
I've been developing a theory of Reddit in my mind for about the last year. It's mostly grown out of the ubiquity and monoculture of AdviceAnimals/memes, but I think it applies to most of the frontpage reddits. Redditors have basically developed and distributed a set of rules for what they find funny/cool/interesting, and endlessly repeat these same jokes/memes. If you follow the frontpage for any reasonable amount of time, you see the same few ideas over and over. Just about everything is somehow referential to a previous post. It almost feels Pavlovian after a while. Someone will post a picture with an attractive female in it. Someone else will comment with a Gif of a bunch of hotdogs being thrown in her face. Someone else will point out that hidden amongst the hotdogs is a finger. Someone else will point out that every time an attractive girl is posted, all of these things occur. This happens over and over, countless times every day. To call it derivative would be generous, because it's a carbon copy. Advice Animals (Image Macros with text) seemed to take this to its extreme. The same 10 images are posted thousands of times per day, with a sentence about how some event in the posters life relates to the meme. If you take away the meme, and simply tell the story by itself, its dull and boring. Attach it to the same picture you've been seeing for the last year and half, and it's got 1000 upvotes. Most of the material on the frontpage of reddit is not interesting on it's own merits. It's only interesting in the context of the thoroughly homogeneous userbase that has been conditioned to respond to the same 15 memes. It seems to me like an advertiser's dream demographic. A clearly delineated set of rules to engage millions of potential customers. Flip this switch, turn that knob, show this meme, reference The Big Lebowski, and Bob's your uncle.
- matkam 12y ago
  The front page of reddit isn't really where the community shines. It represents the greatest common denominator of internet culture, which is pretty much what you described, fueled by kids. A while ago, reddit split off into sub-reddits, each with their own culture and moderators who do their best to keep up quality of posts. For example: reddit.com/r/TrueReddit
- derefr 12y ago
  > If you take away the meme, and simply tell the story by itself, its dull and boring. Attach it to the same picture you've been seeing for the last year and half, and it's got 1000 up votes. IANA Literary Anthropologist, but: when you tell a story from your life by itself, you're presumably telling it about you. People don't care about you: they've never met you, and after they read your words they'll probably never hear from you again. They don't have any previous impressions of you to pattern match their expectations against, so nothing you say can make them go "oh, yeah, that's just like her" or "ha, I knew it" or "oh god, it's going to happen to him again, isn't it?" In the context of an image macro, on the other hand, your story is paraphrased into a sort of shared mythology: there's this one platonic Awkward Penguin/Insanity Wolf/Scumbag Steve, doing all of these things, and acting as a larger-than-life moral symbol of the effects of doing these things in the process. People know what to expect of the character, and so people can seek out these stories when they want something with that "feeling" to it. Presuming you were living in Ancient Greece, you'd see these same people taking various minor heroic moments from their day-to-day lives, exaggerating a bit, and turning them into stories about Hercules. (You can do this for a living, too, creating characters from whole cloth who are larger-than-life molds to match up to various day-to-day stories. The result is called a sitcom.)
scoofy 12y ago
I honestly think the problem isn't reddit. It's the advertisers' model that has the problem. I realize that this is nonsensical, reddit needs the cash, but hear me out. I've been a redditor for nearly 5 years. I'm a moderator on many subs and over time i've even been given the privilege of becoming a moderater on a subreddit with over 100k users. I've been given random reddit gold on 3 occasions (a strange revenue system for letting users know you care by paying reddit to give them some minor perks for about $5), so i think i understand the site fairly accurately. When you move away from the large subreddits, into the niche, you realize that much of reddit is actual adults, with brains, and who aren't too busy to see news, and also have a discussion about it. I've always seen this as a problem for advertisers. Advertisers want it one way. They want to send a message, and they want that to be the only thing said. Take this amazing ad from thai life insurance: http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/22jybg/what_does_kindness_get_you_this/ http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/22jybg/what_does_kin... The top comment, while jokingly so, brings up the point that this is a commercial... it's not real... it's trying to make you think a certain way on purpose. It's manipulative. Reddit breaks the 4th wall. It calls bullshit, and much of the time, it's right. Reddit's problem is that when an ad is truly impressive, a great deal, etc., the relevant firm doesn't need to pay reddit to get attention. The users will do that for them. See dollar shave club: http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/qk7xr/dollarshaveclubcom_our_blades_are_fing_great/ http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/qk7xr/dollarshaveclu... I really don't think there is much of a solution for reddit, but if i were in charge, the way i would generate revenue would be to hold the successful ads hostage. Shadow ban advertisers accounts if they don't play ball. Literally remove viral commercials, but do it quietly. It's an abuse of the system and the users know that, and i think users like me would understand. Make them pay a fee to even attempt to "go viral." That's my 2 cents.
- andrewflnr 12y ago
  But that leads directly to a war of countermeasures as advertisers try to not get their content classified as advertisement. It's a rather blurry line, and regular users will get caught up in a system like that.
  - scoofy 12y ago
AndrewKemendo 12y ago
As a long time reddit user my question is: is there something specific pushing for further monetization? I thought the whole purpose of spinning off from conde nast was to get away from the need to monetize. Why not just match development/maintenance with use? Reddit is well past it's exponential growth phase and is big enough to sustain the community with basically no growth in userbase - so unless I am missing something, this seems like a pure greed play.
- mkal_tsr 12y ago
  > is there something specific pushing for further monetization? It's mentioned in the article and known elsewhere, Reddit is not profitable and has not been profitable to date. Not bleeding out all of your money seems like a specific push for further monetization.
  - AndrewKemendo 12y ago
    Profitable is different than sustainable. So why can't it be sustained without being "profitable?"
    - mkal_tsr 12y ago
      Is Reddit sustainable while it is bleeding money? How many sites are sustainable bleeding money? I'm serious. How is losing money a sustainable business model?
      - AndrewKemendo 12y ago
        From the article and from what I understand around the site, they aren't losing money, they just aren't making profit from the revenues they have. I don't know what their books look like but it appears from what I have seen that they have pretty thin delta between income and outlays.
lazyjones 12y ago
Reddit seems to be doing well. I can tell, because I tried to advertise twice in the past 5 years or so and being from Europe, I had no way to pay for ads (US and UK customers only!). So they have still so much unrealized revenue potential that I wouldn't worry.
Goronmon 12y ago
I'm not sure I'm as big of a fan of advertising firms as the author, and some quotes stood out. “People on Reddit want to be anonymous, and at some point these brands want to have a real relationship with their customers" I find it hard to take an article seriously when it includes quotes like this in a non-critical context. Advertisement is about bullshit, not about "relationships with customers". The job of advertisers is to trick you into think you need whatever they are being paid to sell. They and the companies they work only care about their customers in regards to how much money they can wring out of them. And the parallel is that advertisers don't give a shit about Reddit as well. They are just looking for a way to maximize their ability to wring every cent out of Reddit's userbase regardless of whether the advertising completely destroyed the community.
- enraged_camel 12y ago
  >>I find it hard to take an article seriously when it includes quotes like this in a non-critical context. Advertisement is about bullshit, not about "relationships with customers". The problem is that advertisers think of their job as "relationships with customers." It's the lie they willingly swallow in order to be able to continue looking at themselves in the mirror. I mean, let's face it, no advertiser thinks, "sweet, I suckered ten thousand people to click my ad!" Rather, they think, "I built relationships with ten thousand customers today!"
  - nemothekid 12y ago
    I think that is a rather cynical view of advertisers. The type of advertisers that think of their jobs as "relationships with customers." are not the ones currently advertising online (and by online, I mean anywhere other than Google Search). They type of advertisers that would buy ad-space on a site like Reddit today are definitely thinking "sweet, I suckered ten thousand people to click my ad!" even if not in that language, but they are the ones pouring over CTRs and impressions. The advertisers who actually care about "relationships with customers" are life style brands like, Nike, Coke, Apple, Budweiser, Louis Vuitton, and others, who don't actually care if you click through (what does a click mean to Budweiser? Its not like the market of people who want a bud light via. online is particularly large). They are more concerned with the "relationships with customers" and take a great deal of care on how the product received and how the message is delivered. The goal of these advertisers is to deliver a message, with the confidence that their message won't be warped by content around it. You just can't get that with Reddit. Therefore you are left with these other "unsavory" type of advertisers whose only goal is to convert and will do that until they can wring out every cent out of Reddit's user base.
gregimba 12y ago
The fact you have to ask tells me no.
industriousthou 12y ago
Why not have advertisers partner directly with mods and allow some sort of revenue sharing? The concern seems to be offensive/weird user created content might be displayed near an advertisement. Well, the mods have control over the content. Mods could chose whether or not to enable advertising and could chose whether to curate content to maximize click-throughs or not. Ads could be programmatically targeted towards subreddits and individual comment threads rather than users.
cJ0th 12y ago
The article helps little in answering this question when they interview the wrong experts. The first thing you should do when giving advice is acknowledging reality and then work with that. That is, you should accept reddit for what it is. But all those "experts" giving their opinion in the nyt article are mere bullshit-bingo players pushing reddit to become like every other company: > “People on Reddit want to be anonymous, and at some point these brands want to have a real relationship with their customers,” "“Can Reddit deliver that over time?” > “Reddit is a 1998 product, trying to have a 1998 business model,” I think reddit should come up with a monetizing strategy that capitalizes on the trust users have in it (without abusing it) They would have a massively sustainable competitive advantage. Is there any other web company of that size that you would trust more? Could any one copy this trust within a short amount of time? It's rather tragic that in our society this has so little value that you have to think really hard to come up with a monetizing strategy. Also, I think the idea of a "just self-sustaining" reddit, as some people here have pointed out, is rather interesting. Why does it need to grow? Isn't it enough that it is usefull to their users and poses a stepping stone for entrepreneurs like Mr. Ohanian but also external guys like, for instance, those from imgur or Mr ShittyWaterColour?
baby 12y ago
I'll just c/p what I wrote in the thread where the reporter asked us questions (http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/2bjsxi/how_can_reddit_grow_up_to_become_a_real_business/ http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/2bjsxi/how_c...) Reddit is becoming bigger and bigger. Which is somehow bad as a quality point of view (look at HackerNews, and people there are already complaining that it got too big like reddit). 1 Reddit did a very smart thing to counter that: subreddits. So now you can still dislike reddit as a whole but find what you want in a subreddit. Now I think that if reddit has a way to monetize its website, somewhere, it is through subreddits. You could put a free2play kind of system. Customize your subreddit but pay to unlock features. Create subreddits where you have to pay to get in (it already kind of exists with the lounge). 2 Advertisement. Reddit is really, extremely, reluctant to advertise on reddit. It's nice from a user point of view. But from an advertiser point of view, why? Reddit is the perfect place for ads. Users click and click and click and they read text before clicking. Google ads would make them profitable in a few days. It's important to think about it. EDIT: I'll add that the subscription system makes and the subreddits make it an excellent way to know someone's tastes. It's even better than facebook imo.
- JetSpiegel 12y ago
  They don't need explicit advertising because they already perfected the product placement. Compared to Reddit, that Power Glove film is a masterpiec
ASneakyFox 12y ago
I don't think reddit can be profitable. The moment it is the userbase will move on to the next thing. A new site can spring up over night. A new reddit could be coded in weeks. its all a matter of people choosing to congregate there. This is an ongoing process that is constantly happening. Message boards are popular, and they're cheap.
- ColinCera 12y ago
  >> A new reddit could be coded in weeks. Well, it wouldn't take that long, given that the entire Reddit code base is open source: https://github.com/reddit https://github.com/reddit Really, anybody can literally clone Reddit anytime they want to. But not only is it likely impossible for a competitor to attract a significant portion of the Reddit user base, what would a competitor do assuming they did manage it? All a competitor would have done is bought themselves a money-losing operation. Unless you're a charitable billionaire or a well-funded non-profit organization, why would anyone want to do that?
  - ASneakyFox 12y ago
    I don't think it's do much a company could the over reddits marketshare. Its that there's comment sections and forums every where. If/when reddit dies there will be increased traffic to other forms of blogging/commenting/posting. And eventually a new website will fizzle to the top just out of chance (in the same way reddit did).
read 12y ago
Is this a submarine? Why is a site struggling with journalism (NY Times), and a subscription model, and a paywall (that will become permanent in 3 months), and possibly an advertising problem, advocating that another site (Reddit), with more users, without a subscription model, no paywall, and possibly no advertising problem, is about to change?
- SnydenBitchy 12y ago
  What? Why is a person struggling to grasp the difference between The New York Times and The New Yorker trying to make some point about… something?
  - read 12y ago
    Whoops, my mistake. Sorry. Why did I make this mistake? Did I subconsciously associate the initials NY with evil intentions? It wouldn't be surprising if The New York Times become a casualty of the The New Yorker's policy by accidental association.
return0 12y ago
Can reddit become monetizable? Some of the best online forums of the sort are not-for-profit. It's odd that there isn't yet a donation-supported open alternative of reddit, a-la wikipedia.
Grue3 12y ago
Great, a paywall. Looks like NYTimes has grown up and us plebeians are not allowed to read it anymore.
VLM 12y ago
Why do subreddits have to have only one business model, that being free? Why is the only way to get corporate revenue ugly ads that no one wants to see? Why does a company like Republic Wireless maintain their own lame forum system that boils down to a heavily brain damaged psuedo-clone of Reddit? Why, for a fee paid by RW to /r/, can't /r/republicwireless exist with all of the mods on that subreddit being RW employees, or whoever RW employees select? I'd like that for customer support and product announcements and it would let RW focus on their core competency which is being in the MVNO business not the "running an internet web forum" business. There is a side issue, that I don't think a company that wants to be successful should take business advice from either a legacy newspaper in general, or specifically the NYT, which makes the whole thing comical. It would be like a telegram company demanding that an ISP make core business changes, because they're the experts, or at least they were back in 1890, LOL.
jasonkostempski 12y ago
I've had this idea about how ads should work in situations like this floating around in my head for a while. I know nothing about advertising or monetizing websites and likely this idea has already been presented and shot down but I'd like to see a conversation about it either way. Company X pays Reddit a fixed fee to display a mutually approved, static image, hosted by Reddit servers, linked to a mutually approved web page, on the specified page(s), for a specific amount of time. No generic ad network placeholder, no impression count, no JavaScript, no user tracking, no analytics. Reddit is simply trusted to present the image/link as agreed and Company X is trusted to keep the agreed upon web page at the URL, no switcheroos after the agreement is effective. Maybe the community would know about this arrangement and respect it by not blocking the easily identifiable (no cleaver markup disguises from Reddit) ad elements on the page. I'm thinking the link URL needs to be static, Reddit wouldn't dynamically add anything to it. If the trust is broken by any party the deal is off. Thoughts?
deleted 12y ago
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mark_l_watson 12y ago
As a long time user of Reddit, I have to say: put more ads on the right hand side margin! I don't care, make some money, and stay solid business-wise. Please pardon an off-topic comment: I got to meet Alexis Ohanian when he spoke at Google last year and I really enjoyed his book "Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed." I am an old guy, in my 60s, and I worry a lot about the future our kids and grandkids will have, but then when I meet young people like Alexis who have such a strong attitude about helping society, I feel better :-) If you have a chance to hear him speak, don't pass up the opportunity.
underrated 12y ago
> "We’re not monetizing to the full extent that we could," said Ms. Pao, who made headlines two years ago when she sued Kleiner Perkins in a sexual harassment case. She certainly monetizes to the full extent that she can.

Can Reddit Grow Up?

141 points by digisth 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

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corpselord420 12y ago
hur hur yes god forbid a victim of sexual harassment seek reprimand

beefsack 12y ago

Perhaps a good way to monetise without alienating their core users would be to only advertise on the default subs. The vast majority of users are there, including the less technical users who might be more likely to actually consume the ads instead of ignoring or blocking them. Another idea which I saw the Whirlpool forums do in Australia is to only advertise to those who aren't logged in. If the sub-communities continue to thrive I can't see Reddit fade into obscurity any time soon.

mfenniak 12y ago
I would've thought the opposite. The default subs have large numbers of subscribers (of course), but I feel like they don't have strong communities, or specific themes, that would appeal to an advertiser. Like... /r/funny? /r/creepy? /r/DIY? /r/IAmA? What would compel someone to advertise on those? On the other hand, there are a good number of non-default subs that have strong themes that I'm certain advertisers would want to tap into. For example, city-specific subs, or /r/bodyweightfitness (105,212 subscribers), or /r/bicycling (126,713 subscribers). These communities are so specific that advertising seems like it would be more effective in those areas than any other. Of course... it needs to be done in a way that isn't intrusive or damaging, and that's probably a bigger challenge in a smaller community.
- lelandbatey 12y ago
  Another example: /r/MechanicalKeyboards with 38,000+ subscribers. That's a community just ripe for good advertising.
  - ufo 12y ago
    Are you sure? One would expect that most new product launches or major sales would be linked to by users for free. Additionally, all the major vendors are already linked to in the sidebar wiki posts...
    - lelandbatey 12y ago
      Major vendors, yes. But there are a lot of small run or custom accessories that would sell quite well if they had more exposure. The wiki in the sidebar is good, but what about when a company comes out with a new set of keycaps? Getting that information out can often be iffy, but ads in a major community would make it easy.
  - wisty 12y ago
    Post to /r/MechanicalKeyboards with "I run a Mechanical Keyboard company, AMA", and you'll get an epic thread. Post and ad and it might get 2 comments.
SnydenBitchy 12y ago
Given the hair-raising misogyny, racism, and general terribleness for which reddit’s core users are known, you’d think the company might worry less about alienating them.
- BESebastian 12y ago
  http://killallmen.club/ http://killallmen.club/

alaskamiller 12y ago

I've got my 7 year badge but I don't go back anymore. I'm aged out. The front page doesn't interest me, the memes don't resonate with me, and the reposts don't keep me. It'll keep happening, year after year as most people age out. But year after year more people join up, I'm sure there's a net again. Enough of a momentum that it will just take decades before the decay happens. Radical changes also risk a Digg implosion. Tough nut to crack. They've been taking every trick from the old forum (SomethingAwful, General Mayhem, OffTopic, GaiaOnline) days other than literally charging for membership. Which is always the final cashing out death knell. Common refrain in the past when positing how the community is turning and reducing value the default rah rah answer has always been to hit the edgy subreddits rather than the mainstream ones. That changes the value of the reddit product from a community to community software. My small business projects rely on subreddits for customer service. Give me customization tools and I'll eagerly pay. After all, it's like vBulletin but better and people out of the wazoo for that.

oblio 12y ago
There are people who follow the front page? I don't think I could understand this. In my view the value of reddit, as you pointed out, is in the subreddits: somewhat peer reviewed focused forums with a much better interface than the PHP forums of old. And that's where the money is, IMO. Just as you said, offering enterprisey features for them could rake in a ton of cash.
yzzxy 12y ago
Charging for admission has always struck me, at least in the case of SA, as a tactic to guard the community against, essentially, trolls and children. Not as a moneymaking scheme.
- plorkyeran 12y ago
  SA has also charged for registration for the vast majority of its existence (it was created in 1999 and started charging in 2001), so if it was supposed to be a cash-out before the site died it was a very poorly timed one.
12y ago

ef4 12y ago

... said the dying old media company.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
minimaxir 12y ago
The article was written by Mike Issac, who was ATD/Recode until very recently.
- SwellJoe 12y ago
  I'd never heard of Re/code (yes, I noticed the embarrassing spelling) until just now. reddit serves billions of pageviews a month. I'm not saying this guy's got nothing interesting to say, but it does seem a little bit condescending to say, "Can reddit grow up?" When reddit has already grown to be one of the most popular sites in the world in a quite short time.
  - cliveowen 12y ago
    >in a quite short time Almost 10 years, the same as YouTube.

archildress 12y ago

Maybe I'm suffering from nostalgia, but the Reddit comments were once a place where some good discussions were shared. Now, they've evolved into contests of wit and cross reference to other posts. In the "frontpage" subreddits, the comments are usually void of meaningful discussion that I remember in the earlier days, although I acknowledge I may be romanticizing it a bit. I think I lost interest in Reddit as a whole when I found HN. Curious if any others had the same experience.

amwelles 12y ago
I find that the smaller niche subreddits have that vibe. I subscribe to /r/dogtraining which has loads of valuable information and a ton of helpful, active users.
snowwrestler 12y ago
For me the Reddit homepage is entertainment; a guilty pleasure like some people surf TMZ or whatever. But there seem to be some strong communities in some subreddits. /r/personalfinance is one example off the top of my head. AskScience aggressively prunes bad comments and the net result is good discussion (sometimes surrounded by a ton of deleted comments).
sehr 12y ago
I think I lost interest in Reddit as a whole when I found HN. Once you start exploring the smaller focused subreddits, discussion gets much better. Although even then, the poop can creep in. Prune your subscriptions brutally. Once a sub goes bad, it doesn't go back. Report spam & inflammatory comments etc.. The community is only as good as its members!
- droopyEyelids 12y ago
  As a long time Reddit user, I used to see this advice and sigh, because I thought it was bullshit. However, I just wasn't doing it right. Reddit is now a new tool, and you have to learn how to use it. This took me a long time to adapt to. Remember at one point you figured out that you could search youtube for anything and find someone trying to share how they did it? (how do I change the steering pump on a '92 pontiac sunbird) Reddit is like that now.. for any interest or hobby of yours, visit reddit.com/r/hobbyname. Woah. There is a group of people talking about growing kefir. Large caliber air guns. Building decks. Kiln making. It's almost like the new Usenet, in some ways. The difference is we have a huge ball of greatest common denominator shit that you have to figure out how to sidestep.

programminggeek 12y ago

No, it can't without everybody leaving, but they will all leave anyway. My theory is that social news is like the popular club in a major city or a fad in popular culture. You can't predict which will be a hit or for how long. What you can predict is that eventually when enough people show up that it will lose that quality that made it so interesting to begin with, and the people that made it special will move on. This happened with slashdot, digg, and maybe a bit to Hacker News too. I think Reddit's subreddits have made it more of a community of communities instead of one monolithic thing, with a monolithic front page. That certainly helps it have some legs. However, I really don't see how any fad can sustain itself over the long term and anything that is built on social communities is at the whim of the movement of social opinion and interest. People change, get older, and what made something cool for one generation doesn't necessarily work for another generation. There is no reason that Reddit should be popular as opposed to any other community site other than it's where people are congregating right now. In 5 or 10 years, where will people congregate online?

r0s 12y ago

> Also, the content can range anywhere from a quaint series of animal photos to an intense discussion about bitcoin to graphic pornography, all in a single thread. That could spook brands that do not want their ads displayed alongside not-safe-for-work material. Reddit is too adult for ad networks. Can they grow up?

matt-attack 12y ago

It seems that all the critique in the article stem from the advertiser's perspective. "Oh no we can't make money off of the reddit users" the site must be rubbish and outdated. It needs to be more like facebook so that we companies can connect with users".

mkal_tsr 12y ago
Yup, it smells to much like, "oh, woe are we advertisers for not being able to exploit users for more money, Reddit needs to change, hmmpf"

firemancoder 12y ago

Why does it need to? Is it self sustaining? Maybe that's all it needs to be. When you try hard to commercialize and squeeze profits, things change and you lose audience. This is exactly what it is limiting the lifespan of Facebook.

spaldingwell 12y ago
"This is exactly what it is limiting the lifespan of Facebook" Facebook has over a billion users and has been around for ten years. No other social network can claim both of those things. Don't know if it qualifies as an example of a "limited lifespan"
- goatman 12y ago
  I think he isn't saying it has had a limited life span. He is saying that it's future lifespan is being limited. Basically, he thinks it has potential to go on much longer than it will.

shirro 12y ago

I don't understand the people who don't like Reddit based on the front page. FFS, Reddit is a platform and the action is in the subreddits. There are some very high quality subreddits with good mods which work as well or better than HN.

noblethrasher 12y ago
Case in point: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2bs0rc/ama_feudalism_didnt_exist_the_social_political/ http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2bs0rc/ama_fe...
- codemaster3000 12y ago
  Holy text walls batman :-). Great read though, great writers in that thread and definitely learned a fair share about feudalism (though probably won't remember it for long...)
- egypturnash 12y ago
  Man I love AskHistorians. I am proud to have provided a few top-voted answers there on the subject of animation history.
evan_ 12y ago
OK, but there's basically no way to know what those are.
- andrewflnr 12y ago
  Well, no. It makes more sense to think of a subreddit as a separate site that happens to share hosting with a bunch of other sites. Then it's obvious that you just have to search, follow the links, and try them out to see if they're any good.
- tomjen3 12y ago
  There is almost guaranteed to be a reddit for your interest and it is almost certainly located at reddit.com/r/your_interest.

skizm 12y ago

Ideas for reddit monetization: - Charge $10 a year to keep a subreddit name registered. 500k subreddits, say one half to two thirds pony up, thats $2.5 - 3.3 mil/year. - There is a "trending subreddit" section. Implement a bidding system for a daily "featured subreddit" section similar to this (implement a N day cooldown so larger subs can't buy everyday) - Implement a rev-share system with sub-reddit owners. Paying for a subreddit name could mean no ads, however if the owner wants, they can turn on ads and split the commission with reddit. - Advertise (a little heavier than now) to only non-signed in users. Basically I'm thinking you try and get the subreddit owners to help foot the bill since they are generally the ones getting the most value from the community engine that is reddit.

codemaster3000 12y ago
This is a terrible, terrible idea. The mods of each subreddit are what keep the subreddit alive, and subreddits are the building blocks of Reddit. There are mods who put tons and tons of time maintaining the quality of their sub(s), and they are volunteers and don't get paid for any of their work. Asking them to "pony up" their own money would, with no doubt in my mind, drive them away and completely destroy Reddit. You are grossly over-estimating the number of mods who would "help foot the bill," and completely forgetting about how much hatred Reddit would get form the community if this was implemented. If Reddit considered this strategy for monetization, they'd be much better off shooting off their foot, then shooting their other foot.
- zvrba 12y ago
  > Asking them to "pony up" their own money would, with no doubt in my mind, drive them away and completely destroy Reddit. He wrote nowhere that mods should pay. I as a user would certainly pay $10/yr to keep subreddits I care most about going on.
  - c23gooey 12y ago
    User pays is equally as ridiculous as mod pays. No way as a user i would pay $10/yr when there are multiple sites that will do the same thing as Reddit for free. Im not interested in paying any website for the privilege of expressing my opinion and reading others.

ignostic 12y ago

Reddit wants to be a big company using a site where big companies are the enemy. They could do it, but they need to overhaul the ad system. Having purchased more than a few ads, I can tell you that their platform needs serious help. They're already a step behind because users don't give location or age. To an advertiser who knows the customer, this results in blanketing people you know aren't interested. The real problem is that targeting ads to interested audiences results in very few interactions. When you target to a sub, you have a good chance of showing up on that sub's home page - but no one really goes to a sub home. You need to get people on their front pages. The front page is hyper-competitive: you are bidding against people who are willing to serve ads to ANYONE (ahem, Hipmunk). I've still had some success, but it varies a lot depending on when people buy ads. Their planning tool cannot be relied upon. If reddit were a grown-up advertising company, they'd run it on a cost-per-click bidding basis for link/comment/share/save interactions. Votes would be free to the advertiser, but they'd use recent upvotes and downvotes as a quality score to push ads that people hate off the site and encourage ads people don't mind by giving them a competitive edge. They'd also create more sophisticated targeting options, e.g. people who subscribe to /r/A AND /r/B. Or people who subscribe to /r/A AND either /r/C OR /r/D.

calbear81 12y ago
I think they know their ad system sucked so I read somewhere that http://adzerk.com/ http://adzerk.com/ is now handling almost all of their ads after starting with their display ads.
Vik1ng 12y ago
but no one really goes to a sub home. But don't you also target the ads at comments sections of that sub?
ColinCera 12y ago
>> When you target to a sub, you have a good chance of showing up on that sub's home page - but no one really goes to a sub home. You need to get people on their front pages. Not arguing with your larger points, but this is completely untrue for me — I only use Reddit via subreddit home pages, i.e., I never go to the "front page". I don't even know what a "front page" is. Is that where you just go to http://reddit.com/ http://reddit.com/? I must have visited that once, way back when I first started using Reddit, but since then, never. I have a dozen or so subreddits I'm interested in and when I will occasionally get a whim to check up on one of them, I navigate directly to the subreddit (autocomplete in the browser makes this easier). I also subscribe to RSS feeds for my subreddits. Apparently I'm using Reddit in an unusual way.

steven2012 12y ago

Reddit has the best content for any message style forum I've ever come across. The combination of user voting plus moderation works incredibly. And it's not just a few subreddits, it's a huge swath of them. They've attracted the best community of users that I've ever seen and that positive feedback loop of easy-to-use UI plus great username creates a fantastic site. The top comment is usually useful no matter what the topic is, and I usually never leave disappointed when I read a thread I'm curious about. It would be a shame if they ruined the site a la digg by trying to monetize too aggressively.

tmuir 12y ago

I've been developing a theory of Reddit in my mind for about the last year. It's mostly grown out of the ubiquity and monoculture of AdviceAnimals/memes, but I think it applies to most of the frontpage reddits. Redditors have basically developed and distributed a set of rules for what they find funny/cool/interesting, and endlessly repeat these same jokes/memes. If you follow the frontpage for any reasonable amount of time, you see the same few ideas over and over. Just about everything is somehow referential to a previous post. It almost feels Pavlovian after a while. Someone will post a picture with an attractive female in it. Someone else will comment with a Gif of a bunch of hotdogs being thrown in her face. Someone else will point out that hidden amongst the hotdogs is a finger. Someone else will point out that every time an attractive girl is posted, all of these things occur. This happens over and over, countless times every day. To call it derivative would be generous, because it's a carbon copy. Advice Animals (Image Macros with text) seemed to take this to its extreme. The same 10 images are posted thousands of times per day, with a sentence about how some event in the posters life relates to the meme. If you take away the meme, and simply tell the story by itself, its dull and boring. Attach it to the same picture you've been seeing for the last year and half, and it's got 1000 upvotes. Most of the material on the frontpage of reddit is not interesting on it's own merits. It's only interesting in the context of the thoroughly homogeneous userbase that has been conditioned to respond to the same 15 memes. It seems to me like an advertiser's dream demographic. A clearly delineated set of rules to engage millions of potential customers. Flip this switch, turn that knob, show this meme, reference The Big Lebowski, and Bob's your uncle.

matkam 12y ago
The front page of reddit isn't really where the community shines. It represents the greatest common denominator of internet culture, which is pretty much what you described, fueled by kids. A while ago, reddit split off into sub-reddits, each with their own culture and moderators who do their best to keep up quality of posts. For example: reddit.com/r/TrueReddit
derefr 12y ago
> If you take away the meme, and simply tell the story by itself, its dull and boring. Attach it to the same picture you've been seeing for the last year and half, and it's got 1000 up votes. IANA Literary Anthropologist, but: when you tell a story from your life by itself, you're presumably telling it about you. People don't care about you: they've never met you, and after they read your words they'll probably never hear from you again. They don't have any previous impressions of you to pattern match their expectations against, so nothing you say can make them go "oh, yeah, that's just like her" or "ha, I knew it" or "oh god, it's going to happen to him again, isn't it?" In the context of an image macro, on the other hand, your story is paraphrased into a sort of shared mythology: there's this one platonic Awkward Penguin/Insanity Wolf/Scumbag Steve, doing all of these things, and acting as a larger-than-life moral symbol of the effects of doing these things in the process. People know what to expect of the character, and so people can seek out these stories when they want something with that "feeling" to it. Presuming you were living in Ancient Greece, you'd see these same people taking various minor heroic moments from their day-to-day lives, exaggerating a bit, and turning them into stories about Hercules. (You can do this for a living, too, creating characters from whole cloth who are larger-than-life molds to match up to various day-to-day stories. The result is called a sitcom.)

scoofy 12y ago

I honestly think the problem isn't reddit. It's the advertisers' model that has the problem. I realize that this is nonsensical, reddit needs the cash, but hear me out. I've been a redditor for nearly 5 years. I'm a moderator on many subs and over time i've even been given the privilege of becoming a moderater on a subreddit with over 100k users. I've been given random reddit gold on 3 occasions (a strange revenue system for letting users know you care by paying reddit to give them some minor perks for about $5), so i think i understand the site fairly accurately. When you move away from the large subreddits, into the niche, you realize that much of reddit is actual adults, with brains, and who aren't too busy to see news, and also have a discussion about it. I've always seen this as a problem for advertisers. Advertisers want it one way. They want to send a message, and they want that to be the only thing said. Take this amazing ad from thai life insurance: http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/22jybg/what_does_kindness_get_you_this/ http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/22jybg/what_does_kin... The top comment, while jokingly so, brings up the point that this is a commercial... it's not real... it's trying to make you think a certain way on purpose. It's manipulative. Reddit breaks the 4th wall. It calls bullshit, and much of the time, it's right. Reddit's problem is that when an ad is truly impressive, a great deal, etc., the relevant firm doesn't need to pay reddit to get attention. The users will do that for them. See dollar shave club: http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/qk7xr/dollarshaveclubcom_our_blades_are_fing_great/ http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/qk7xr/dollarshaveclu... I really don't think there is much of a solution for reddit, but if i were in charge, the way i would generate revenue would be to hold the successful ads hostage. Shadow ban advertisers accounts if they don't play ball. Literally remove viral commercials, but do it quietly. It's an abuse of the system and the users know that, and i think users like me would understand. Make them pay a fee to even attempt to "go viral." That's my 2 cents.

andrewflnr 12y ago
But that leads directly to a war of countermeasures as advertisers try to not get their content classified as advertisement. It's a rather blurry line, and regular users will get caught up in a system like that.
- scoofy 12y ago

AndrewKemendo 12y ago

As a long time reddit user my question is: is there something specific pushing for further monetization? I thought the whole purpose of spinning off from conde nast was to get away from the need to monetize. Why not just match development/maintenance with use? Reddit is well past it's exponential growth phase and is big enough to sustain the community with basically no growth in userbase - so unless I am missing something, this seems like a pure greed play.

mkal_tsr 12y ago
> is there something specific pushing for further monetization? It's mentioned in the article and known elsewhere, Reddit is not profitable and has not been profitable to date. Not bleeding out all of your money seems like a specific push for further monetization.
- AndrewKemendo 12y ago
  Profitable is different than sustainable. So why can't it be sustained without being "profitable?"
  - mkal_tsr 12y ago
    Is Reddit sustainable while it is bleeding money? How many sites are sustainable bleeding money? I'm serious. How is losing money a sustainable business model?
    - AndrewKemendo 12y ago
      From the article and from what I understand around the site, they aren't losing money, they just aren't making profit from the revenues they have. I don't know what their books look like but it appears from what I have seen that they have pretty thin delta between income and outlays.

lazyjones 12y ago

Reddit seems to be doing well. I can tell, because I tried to advertise twice in the past 5 years or so and being from Europe, I had no way to pay for ads (US and UK customers only!). So they have still so much unrealized revenue potential that I wouldn't worry.

Goronmon 12y ago

I'm not sure I'm as big of a fan of advertising firms as the author, and some quotes stood out. “People on Reddit want to be anonymous, and at some point these brands want to have a real relationship with their customers" I find it hard to take an article seriously when it includes quotes like this in a non-critical context. Advertisement is about bullshit, not about "relationships with customers". The job of advertisers is to trick you into think you need whatever they are being paid to sell. They and the companies they work only care about their customers in regards to how much money they can wring out of them. And the parallel is that advertisers don't give a shit about Reddit as well. They are just looking for a way to maximize their ability to wring every cent out of Reddit's userbase regardless of whether the advertising completely destroyed the community.

enraged_camel 12y ago
>>I find it hard to take an article seriously when it includes quotes like this in a non-critical context. Advertisement is about bullshit, not about "relationships with customers". The problem is that advertisers think of their job as "relationships with customers." It's the lie they willingly swallow in order to be able to continue looking at themselves in the mirror. I mean, let's face it, no advertiser thinks, "sweet, I suckered ten thousand people to click my ad!" Rather, they think, "I built relationships with ten thousand customers today!"
- nemothekid 12y ago
  I think that is a rather cynical view of advertisers. The type of advertisers that think of their jobs as "relationships with customers." are not the ones currently advertising online (and by online, I mean anywhere other than Google Search). They type of advertisers that would buy ad-space on a site like Reddit today are definitely thinking "sweet, I suckered ten thousand people to click my ad!" even if not in that language, but they are the ones pouring over CTRs and impressions. The advertisers who actually care about "relationships with customers" are life style brands like, Nike, Coke, Apple, Budweiser, Louis Vuitton, and others, who don't actually care if you click through (what does a click mean to Budweiser? Its not like the market of people who want a bud light via. online is particularly large). They are more concerned with the "relationships with customers" and take a great deal of care on how the product received and how the message is delivered. The goal of these advertisers is to deliver a message, with the confidence that their message won't be warped by content around it. You just can't get that with Reddit. Therefore you are left with these other "unsavory" type of advertisers whose only goal is to convert and will do that until they can wring out every cent out of Reddit's user base.

gregimba 12y ago

The fact you have to ask tells me no.

industriousthou 12y ago

Why not have advertisers partner directly with mods and allow some sort of revenue sharing? The concern seems to be offensive/weird user created content might be displayed near an advertisement. Well, the mods have control over the content. Mods could chose whether or not to enable advertising and could chose whether to curate content to maximize click-throughs or not. Ads could be programmatically targeted towards subreddits and individual comment threads rather than users.

cJ0th 12y ago

The article helps little in answering this question when they interview the wrong experts. The first thing you should do when giving advice is acknowledging reality and then work with that. That is, you should accept reddit for what it is. But all those "experts" giving their opinion in the nyt article are mere bullshit-bingo players pushing reddit to become like every other company: > “People on Reddit want to be anonymous, and at some point these brands want to have a real relationship with their customers,” "“Can Reddit deliver that over time?” > “Reddit is a 1998 product, trying to have a 1998 business model,” I think reddit should come up with a monetizing strategy that capitalizes on the trust users have in it (without abusing it) They would have a massively sustainable competitive advantage. Is there any other web company of that size that you would trust more? Could any one copy this trust within a short amount of time? It's rather tragic that in our society this has so little value that you have to think really hard to come up with a monetizing strategy. Also, I think the idea of a "just self-sustaining" reddit, as some people here have pointed out, is rather interesting. Why does it need to grow? Isn't it enough that it is usefull to their users and poses a stepping stone for entrepreneurs like Mr. Ohanian but also external guys like, for instance, those from imgur or Mr ShittyWaterColour?

baby 12y ago

I'll just c/p what I wrote in the thread where the reporter asked us questions (http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/2bjsxi/how_can_reddit_grow_up_to_become_a_real_business/ http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/2bjsxi/how_c...) Reddit is becoming bigger and bigger. Which is somehow bad as a quality point of view (look at HackerNews, and people there are already complaining that it got too big like reddit). 1 Reddit did a very smart thing to counter that: subreddits. So now you can still dislike reddit as a whole but find what you want in a subreddit. Now I think that if reddit has a way to monetize its website, somewhere, it is through subreddits. You could put a free2play kind of system. Customize your subreddit but pay to unlock features. Create subreddits where you have to pay to get in (it already kind of exists with the lounge). 2 Advertisement. Reddit is really, extremely, reluctant to advertise on reddit. It's nice from a user point of view. But from an advertiser point of view, why? Reddit is the perfect place for ads. Users click and click and click and they read text before clicking. Google ads would make them profitable in a few days. It's important to think about it. EDIT: I'll add that the subscription system makes and the subreddits make it an excellent way to know someone's tastes. It's even better than facebook imo.

JetSpiegel 12y ago
They don't need explicit advertising because they already perfected the product placement. Compared to Reddit, that Power Glove film is a masterpiec

ASneakyFox 12y ago

I don't think reddit can be profitable. The moment it is the userbase will move on to the next thing. A new site can spring up over night. A new reddit could be coded in weeks. its all a matter of people choosing to congregate there. This is an ongoing process that is constantly happening. Message boards are popular, and they're cheap.

ColinCera 12y ago
>> A new reddit could be coded in weeks. Well, it wouldn't take that long, given that the entire Reddit code base is open source: https://github.com/reddit https://github.com/reddit Really, anybody can literally clone Reddit anytime they want to. But not only is it likely impossible for a competitor to attract a significant portion of the Reddit user base, what would a competitor do assuming they did manage it? All a competitor would have done is bought themselves a money-losing operation. Unless you're a charitable billionaire or a well-funded non-profit organization, why would anyone want to do that?
- ASneakyFox 12y ago
  I don't think it's do much a company could the over reddits marketshare. Its that there's comment sections and forums every where. If/when reddit dies there will be increased traffic to other forms of blogging/commenting/posting. And eventually a new website will fizzle to the top just out of chance (in the same way reddit did).

read 12y ago

Is this a submarine? Why is a site struggling with journalism (NY Times), and a subscription model, and a paywall (that will become permanent in 3 months), and possibly an advertising problem, advocating that another site (Reddit), with more users, without a subscription model, no paywall, and possibly no advertising problem, is about to change?

SnydenBitchy 12y ago
What? Why is a person struggling to grasp the difference between The New York Times and The New Yorker trying to make some point about… something?
- read 12y ago
  Whoops, my mistake. Sorry. Why did I make this mistake? Did I subconsciously associate the initials NY with evil intentions? It wouldn't be surprising if The New York Times become a casualty of the The New Yorker's policy by accidental association.

return0 12y ago

Can reddit become monetizable? Some of the best online forums of the sort are not-for-profit. It's odd that there isn't yet a donation-supported open alternative of reddit, a-la wikipedia.

Grue3 12y ago

Great, a paywall. Looks like NYTimes has grown up and us plebeians are not allowed to read it anymore.

VLM 12y ago

Why do subreddits have to have only one business model, that being free? Why is the only way to get corporate revenue ugly ads that no one wants to see? Why does a company like Republic Wireless maintain their own lame forum system that boils down to a heavily brain damaged psuedo-clone of Reddit? Why, for a fee paid by RW to /r/, can't /r/republicwireless exist with all of the mods on that subreddit being RW employees, or whoever RW employees select? I'd like that for customer support and product announcements and it would let RW focus on their core competency which is being in the MVNO business not the "running an internet web forum" business. There is a side issue, that I don't think a company that wants to be successful should take business advice from either a legacy newspaper in general, or specifically the NYT, which makes the whole thing comical. It would be like a telegram company demanding that an ISP make core business changes, because they're the experts, or at least they were back in 1890, LOL.

jasonkostempski 12y ago

I've had this idea about how ads should work in situations like this floating around in my head for a while. I know nothing about advertising or monetizing websites and likely this idea has already been presented and shot down but I'd like to see a conversation about it either way. Company X pays Reddit a fixed fee to display a mutually approved, static image, hosted by Reddit servers, linked to a mutually approved web page, on the specified page(s), for a specific amount of time. No generic ad network placeholder, no impression count, no JavaScript, no user tracking, no analytics. Reddit is simply trusted to present the image/link as agreed and Company X is trusted to keep the agreed upon web page at the URL, no switcheroos after the agreement is effective. Maybe the community would know about this arrangement and respect it by not blocking the easily identifiable (no cleaver markup disguises from Reddit) ad elements on the page. I'm thinking the link URL needs to be static, Reddit wouldn't dynamically add anything to it. If the trust is broken by any party the deal is off. Thoughts?

deleted 12y ago

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mark_l_watson 12y ago

As a long time user of Reddit, I have to say: put more ads on the right hand side margin! I don't care, make some money, and stay solid business-wise. Please pardon an off-topic comment: I got to meet Alexis Ohanian when he spoke at Google last year and I really enjoyed his book "Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed." I am an old guy, in my 60s, and I worry a lot about the future our kids and grandkids will have, but then when I meet young people like Alexis who have such a strong attitude about helping society, I feel better :-) If you have a chance to hear him speak, don't pass up the opportunity.

underrated 12y ago

> "We’re not monetizing to the full extent that we could," said Ms. Pao, who made headlines two years ago when she sued Kleiner Perkins in a sexual harassment case. She certainly monetizes to the full extent that she can.