Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B
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It took me about ten years to figure out that Twitter is a cesspool of useless noise and ego. Everybody tries to outdo each other with noise and follower count. What Reddit does right is focus on topics, primarily, not personalities. (Although I actually like the new user profiles, since they tend to be secondary focus).
Twitter could have been something different, and I think that expectation for something more got priced into what it is valued at today. Based on Twitter's current market cap (12.12 billion dollars!) it's already overvalued by a LOT; and there's really nowhere else for it to go but down. Any new users it gets are just bots or other political warfare tools.
For me, the final straw was that Twitter wouldn't "verify" Ecosteader as a legit account. So I deleted my Twitter accounts, sold a small investment I'd opened a couple years ago, and now spend more of my idle time reading Reddit rather than Twitter. And I feel so much better for it...
A subreddit is far more useful than a hashtag... it has stay power, searchability, and (like Twitter) is the kind of place where people will vent and where companies can interact with customers / users. The key for Reddit, I think, will be to do what is right for its users to achieve information awareness... Conde Nast is a news platform, after all. Let's just hope they don't let themselves go the way of Yelp.
I think they've been trying to change that recently; they've been focusing more on content creators - people like Shitty_Watercolour who are known Reddit-wide for the original content they post. As you noted, they launched a new type of profile which basically turns it into a subreddit, which they're pushing as a way for content creators to post their works easily.[0] The feature is still being developed but is now available to more people.
To be clear, the feature is a good one in concept, but I think the fact that they chose to market the feature this way as opposed to marketing it as "bringing old-school link blogs back" or similar says a lot about how Reddit wants to change its image.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/60p3n1/tldr_...
To me that feature just looks like a way to add RSS/ RSS-like functionality to links a user wants to share or posts a user has participated in... it can be used for self-promotional purposes, but it doesn't have to be.
My biggest complaint (and something I worry about when they talk about redesigning/reimplementing the site) is that the page just isn't all that great.
It's slow to load (where the old overview page was pretty much instantaneous), lacks features (though two more clicks will get you back to the superior overview page), and at least to my eyes, it's even uglier than normal reddit (though admittedly this is mostly subjective).
If this is what happens when they roll out new features, I worry that the rest of the site will wind up like it once they do their redesign.
That's what Reddit has been, in my humble opinion, since I've started using it - since 2005.
Country subs, most of the most famous subs, pretty much everywhere - it's just a lot of nonsensical quips, flame wars, karma hoarding (Reddit has a different unparliamentary word for that starting with "w"), the ubiquitous herd-mentality - one comment (mostly a "quip" reply) that came early gets bigger and bigger and everything else takes naturally a back seat, your very genuine doubts, points getting downvotted to oblivion sometimes for no apparent reason. It's a big list I believe.
Yes, there are subs which are good and can actually mean some meaningful interaction but it's not very proper to always call reddit right or better than Twitter or any other medium by referring to those few subs like /r/TrueFilm [0], then there's /r/DepthHub and /r/TrueReddit which are supposed to be "good" reddit but there are just no interactive discussions there they usually connect to popular comments usually highly gilded and popular ones.
Initially /r/ImAA seemed promising but that's just a PR board or been reduced to it. No, candid conversation (and I don't mean masala and gossip and scandal) is as rare as it gets. Places like /r/AskHistorians are as difficult to start participating that you just give up in the first go - it doesn't at all encourage participation; you don't know who you will flare up with your seemingly innocuous comment. At many places Reddit makes being a newbie almomst a crime and then there's instant justive too.
Reddit, for me, is mostly about what I have mentioned above and mod ego, monopoloy and knee jerk reactions and botached interventions by admins if at all they do. Abuse goes unchecked which is compounded by the herd-mentality. Like really unchecked and it's a hell for female users. The famous Reddit saying goes like "There are no girls on the Internet" and whenever a user is indentified as one it's almost unlivable there for them. And then there's doxxing.
Reddit sometimes works for just a lurker whenever I need something and it has it. Or a casual browsing for few minutes here and there.
[0] Conincidentally when I opened it there's this post from a day ago - https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/comments/6hg21r/the_declin...
Pretty sure that's actually 4Chan originally.
Reddit has similar problems
> What Reddit does right is focus on topics, primarily, not personalities.
This is an advantage for twitter in many ways, people want to follow and interact with other credible people not with a bunch of random people with no credible experience discussing a topic on reddit
* They're launching new user profiles that center around the user; see the Washington post's Reddit account
* Reddit's model of communities is fundamentally broken. Each sub, unless STRONGLY curated like AskHistorians, develops its own hivemind. Post against the grain and receive downvotes, then take the downvote train as people LOVE to pile on downvotes.
* Reddit's upvote / downvote system is fundamentally broken. Easy to parse, light content or quips / jokes get hundreds of upvotes while actual, informational but boring responses get buried way below.
* Reddit has BLATANT advertising masquerading as user posts to big subs like Pics or MildyInteresting, or TodayILearned. Perfect usage of brand names, convenient brand symbol or product positioned perfectly, etc. And somehow posts that are straight up advertising get thousands of upvotes quickly.
* Reddit has done nothing about certain subreddits automatically banning people who post in X Y Z other subreddits, regardless of the content of their response.
* Their CEO, Spez, shadow edited people's comments in the_donald without telling anyone. Ellen Pao even commented on this and nothing fucking happened.
Etc. there are plus sides to reddit, but very few subs worth commenting in unless you have the popular opinion.
It still hasn't been added.
The first x minutes of a post are _heavily_ influential in the success of the post, editing after allows you to hijack successful titles for gain (spam)
For large subs, posts only hit the top of /new for x minutes (for small x), editing after is basically useless if it's not successful in that time
Mods patrol the /new queue as posts come in, allowing editing will complicate moderation which is already a difficult job
Yes it could be misused, but go on any forum where you can edit titles or post content and look at how often such a feature actually does get abused.
It pretty much never happens. Most people (like 99.99% of them) either use the functionality how it was intended or don't bother editing at all.
I don't see the point of limiting a feature because about 0.1% of the userbase might theoretically abuse it in a certain situation. It's basically the social media/forum equivalent of the trolley problem and automated cars. Something that's going to happen very rarely at the most but draws a lot of discussion about 'what ifs'.
Its quite possible many features simply would raise their costs by .X% and therefore were impossible for that reason.
This starts approaching a blogging or CMS system, but then, Reddit is already damned close to that, though with a larger community than most same.
Under this model:
* An item would be submitted.
* If approvals / edit / drafting is set, it goes to a submission or edit queue.
* A set of mods/editors would provide feedback and/or make edits (which of these apply depending on the sub).
* The item is then submitted.
This would allow for adjusting titles, self-text, formatting, etc. I'm not claiming this is something all subs would want, but some would (and I've a few specific ones in mind).
For now, the fix is to delete the submission entirely and submit it anew. I've certainly done that within my own sub(s).
Even today I prefer to use the desktop version of Reddit on my phone, because I can just go through content threads a lot faster than compared to their mobile site.
https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/66q4is/the_web_red...
Situations like this are extremely difficult to predict accurately. It could become a big problem. But it has a decent chance of blowing over.
The main issue is to harness the energy that the moderators currently put into their subreddit. They're not sad that CSS is going away. They're sad their toys are being taken away from them. That's not to trivialize it, not at all -- people like to tinker, and playing with your subreddit and putting your markings on it is a toy for adults. It's a game. It's necessary to replace that with something that feels equally deep and immersive.
Or, you know, just don't mess with the status quo. But if you're going to do it, I think that's why people are rebelling. Not because the functionality is gone, but because they're losing a creative outlet.
Availability hueristic and personal bias. There are others.
CSS is a tool. Often, but not always misused.
Reddit has a setting to disable custom CSS on subreddits, so it doesn't make sense why you'd force the subreddits not to have it.
What's worse is that their new mobile site and their profile pages use more whitespace. A sign of things to come probably.
Making it beautiful with nice animations should come second and the mobile version still crash a few times a day for me.
Recently they added a useless interstitial.
It's interesting to me they say the app is faster; presumably they're artificially slowing the mobile site just to push app installs.
Kuro5hin did achieve some of the most amazing content, however.
Unfortunately, this doesn't appear to be the case. They haven't been hiding that they're gearing up for a major redesign.
From what I've seen so far, I'm not at all excited for it. They launched user profiles recently, and it's an uninspired blocky design with way too much unnecessary whitespace for a desktop site. Also, even on desktop there is noticeable Javascript induced lag and content pop in. Although the rest of the profile page tries to look like a standard reddit page, it's actually entirely done with react and the subreddit/notification bar at the top has the same lag and content pop in. They're also hiring mainly for React frontend/Node.js backend, so I'm worried the entire redesign is going to be low density and slow.
If so, there are a number of other intentionally lightweight virtual dom frontend frameworks. Mithril, Riot, Preact, virtual-dom all come to mind, and there are a probably a few more.
tl;dr Don't blame tools but their usage
That has been shown to not hold in actual benchmarks. The real DOM is plenty fast if you do it right.
Here's Facebook's Dan Abramov (of Redux fame): "Myth: React is “faster than DOM”. Reality: it helps create maintainable applications, and is fast enough for most use cases."
https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/842329893044146176?la...
https://objectpartners.com/2015/11/19/comparing-react-js-per...
I understand the point of frontend frameworks for SPA, not so much for Reddit profile pages which are literally single, static, pages.
I'm hoping that, like some of Reddit's other weird ideas, it kind of just gets abandoned and left to die.
Having said that, not all features would be _that_ intensive on systems.
Creative outlets that you can share with others are also rewarding.
If a company can get a 10X rate of return on an April Fool creation, why wouldn't it?
That said, I believe they are heavily recruiting at all levels so if you want to work for Reddit, apply now.
Also, they expose their data via an API that developers have used to make all sorts of features, giving them the luxury of being able to basically test features without actually implementing them.
I'd really like to hear from a reddit volunteer moderator, a group who essentially keeps the site running for free and who have voiced their concerns over lack of tooling for... again a decade.
Finally we're only a year or two out from major PR issues at the company. I would not be surprised if it alienated engineering talent (that and presumably a smaller budget for compensation due to the revenue, profitability, time since last raise, etc.).
For most companies it is. But sites like reddit get people to do it for free. Basic A/B testing takes a not insignificant amount of resources, usually consisting of at least a marketing/analytics person, a developer, a designer, qa resources and a project manager.
Previous large-scale changes have been presented to their community and generally have been panned by the community, and often unreasonably so.
Personally I prefer it far, far more than the constant changes some startups seem to feel is necessary to justify their existence.
I read through the front page of each of the top 5,000 subreddits (by subscribers) over the last few weeks, and a lot of the subreddits are adding hundreds or thousands of new subscribers per week. They seem to have gone into hypergrowth recently without anyone really noticing.
The other interesting thing of note is that of the 125,000ish posts I read through, there are only a few dozen submissions from independent blogs on the front page of all of these subreddits put together at any given time.
1. Reddit's internecine subreddit wars required constant admin intervention and mediation. Reddit only has so many hands on deck, so more of than not, they pulled engineers in to help moderate.[1]
2. Reddit is unprofitable, so they have trouble affording top talent. [2]
3. Finally, Reddit's vision for the future has been hazy for the last decade. If the navigators can't chart a course, all the rowing in the world won't move the ship in the right direction. I suspect the overdone April Fools experiments are a result of engineering not being given technically compelling, or perhaps meaningful features to labor over.
Sources:
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/58zaho/the_...
[2]http://www.thedrum.com/news/2017/04/02/reddit-sets-eyes-prof...
2. They've had plenty of money from investments though, their dev team is reasonably sized.
3. This one seems pretty accurate.
2. I'm having trouble finding their burn rate; the linked article at least hints that they'll use this money to attract talent.
There's only so much moderation a single person can handle in a day. The NY Times moderation team posted some stats a ways back, it worked out to about 800 items/person/day. Which, in an 8-hour day works out to an item every 35 seconds. Sustained. Throughout the entire day.
Techs can leverage patterns, even if it means a lot of ad hoc code.
Building training systems is even better.
Considering what Reddit's been through in the past couple of years by way of direct information attacks (even not counting any systems-level attacks), involving coloured tablets and giant orange peaches, I don't find the story that dev time has been accounted for particularly unreasonable.
2. Come on, it's Reddit. I feel like many many developers would be interested on brand alone. I was, for a time.
3. Possible. But there's a difference between adding random directionless features (which they haven't really done), and not doing anything at all (which they have).
2. From what I hear, Reddit wants the best, but the best are aware that Reddit's brand conceals well-documented dysfunction:
https://www.recode.net/2015/7/13/11614676/reddit-chief-engin....
https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2iea97/i_am_a_former_r...
The links go on.
3. I worked recently at a startup where the product was a shambling, swelling mass of features, implicitly designed to obscure its missing core value proposition to both investors and to the founders. There is definitely a difference in the process; perhaps not a meaningful difference in the outcome, which for those invested in the company is impotence, toxicity, despair, etc.
Additionally, from the various threads on reddit that I've seen people post about the company. They've done a lot of work on the background to reduce spam, which isn't something that is super obvious to someone not specifically looking to spam the site.
(Just a note, your profile's upvotes appear to be public. This is a toggle available in options)
Could you be more specific?
I get the impression that Reddit has a lot of technical debt that makes developing new features difficult, and would take some major effort to refactor themselves out of
Found out it was Steve Huffman.
At about the start of 2017, Reddit saw a noticeable increase in the activity growth rate, which investors love (although the biggest chunk occurred around October/November 2016, due to the U.S. Election)
And here's the BigQuery to reproduce the aggregation:
#standardSQL
SELECT DATE_TRUNC(DATE(TIMESTAMP_SECONDS(created_utc)), MONTH) as mon, COUNT(*) as num_submissions
FROM `fh-bigquery.reddit_posts.*`
WHERE (_TABLE_SUFFIX BETWEEN "2015_12" AND "2017_04" OR _TABLE_SUFFIX = "full_corpus_201512")
GROUP BY mon
ORDER BY monLet's get some engagement stats on those user counts.
Sometimes they do that under the covers, so to speak, and some users don't like it (e.g. hailcorporate) but often they will promote their products transparently, and often normal users don't mind. The most obvious example is Netflix on /r/movies. Multiple employees were observed continuously posting things to the site, via submissions, comments etc and users liked it.
By introducing a charge for these corporate users they can reap in a substantial income. Whether it would make sense for them to label these corp users as such is another option, but they certainly know about them. I find it interesting that most normal users find that they don't mind interacting with paid marketing employees and that they consider it organic and natural, very interesting. I also find it worrying.
Another phenomenon I've been seeing more of is a company that gets in early to a niche gaining control of the subreddit around that niche, tilting the scales in their favor.
Two examples I can think of are /r/nootropics, whose mod team is led by the owner of nootropics supplier Ceretropic, and /r/amazonmerch, whose sole mod is the owner of MerchInformer, a SaaS Amazon Merch research product.
They're each careful to never moderate in an overtly heavy-handed way that would cause a user revolt, but nonetheless, their companies are mentioned in the each subreddit far more often than their competitors. It's an inherent conflict of interest, and one that will only worsen as these niches grow in popularity.
To become more successful
What black magic is this? Surely you aren't suggesting... the d-word?!
> What black magic is this? Surely you aren't suggesting... the d-word?!
Okay, I'll bite. What's the d-word?
Pretty simple to imagine that being worth far more than $1 billion. Their user growth recently has been astounding.
Since almost all attempts to really monetize Reddit in the past have failed because of massive backlash from the users I wonder what the plan is. There has to be some kind of major change to either Reddit or to the audience to warrant the valuation.
Exactly this. Reddit has been around long enough that I don't foresee any experimentation that could yield this type of commercial turnaround.
Also I suspect the site is increasingly populated with bots, not real users. I'd actually imagine the site is less popular this year in terms of real users than it was a year ago, although I have no way to know that and could be wrong. I'd need to see hard evidence to believe it hasn't had a rapidly growing bot population though.
Companies are valued based on discounted future cash flow. In other words, investors are betting that at some point in time Reddit will generate billions, even when adjusted for a discount for time. That's not crazy at all to me to see that happening.
Their pushes for email registration and the feed-based ads in the mobile app make that direction pretty well telegraphed.
But I'd draw an interesting parallel here with the fact that, like Snapchat, many Reddit users do it with some expectation of anonymity/privacy. It is difficult to command the kind of CPMs Google and Facebook can without knowing an awful lot about uniquely identified users. Reddit has a comment and engagement data goldmine at their fingertips, but they need to burn through a heck of a lot of user trust to leverage it to its full potential.
Seems like spez disagrees, interestingly.
> ‘We know your dark secrets. We know everything.’
https://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2016/05/30/reddit-knows-y...
I've been comparing Facebook's Advertiser tools and options with Reddit's. Reddit is miles behind, in terms of making it easy to try different campaigns, different headlines, different messages.
Pandering to advertiser's inevitably leads to them having too much say (which they don't deserve), and trying to implement ever more tracking and insidious advertising methods.
I for enjoy the fact that Reddit's approach/attitude to advertising seems to be: here's your box-stay in your box, and you'll have these basic tools and you'll fucking like it".
Reddit is only a thing because people feel safe there. What other site of its user base does that?
IMO, reddit is a thing because it is topic oriented instead of user/ego oriented. It really is the modern day Usenet.
The two long term problems they have though is moneytising and bad/illegal content (moderation).
I'm surprised Reddit stays so popular. I stopped using it ~8 years ago. The habit didn't stick with me (beyond a year or two).
Step 1: Get a lot of users
Step 2: Major losses
Step 3: ?????
Step 4: Profit?
If Reddit's experience starts sucking once they try to monetize, there will be no shortage of people who are going to offer a superior (i.e. non-monetized) experience with the intent of somehow monetizing The Right Way in the future. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Their struggles with advertisement is something they can actively address now. Before when they were smaller than digg once digg made a huge mister and alienated their users this allowed to flourish into the site it is today. Due to the fear of what occurred to Digg their advertising was less aggressive their advertisements have been less aggressive and attempt to be targeted. But, since reddit is so large now the risk of alienation is much less. Also, other condenders like imgur and voat have tried to take the throne from reddit without success. Also, they have made great strides in making it accessible to everyone and you can get anyone from any political spectrum. If reddit wants to make money they have to broaden their appeal greatly and I believe thats the purpose of the $150m. Hopefully when they do this they won't turn out like digg because they are a much larger network now.
Others had to come in and explain that yes, in fact Mark Zuckerburg could edit your Facebook comments if he really wanted to, and admins could edit your comments on other forums and so on. It's just usually they choose not to.
Ugh I had a long argument with someone in college about why their car wouldn't start... it couldn't possibly be a dead battery, they didn't drive an electric car.
https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-stev...
Disclosure: Worked in this space 10+ years.
Why not? It was around 4 years ago, and seems to be more or less as healthy today as it was then.
As to the claim of reddit dying within four years, lol! I'll take that bet.
Forums have topics, reddit doesn't have topics, subreddits have topics.
Reddit has over 250 million users. Very very few social apps have that many users.
According to https://www.dreamgrow.com/top-15-most-popular-social-network... only Facebook, YouTube/Google+, Instagram, and Twitter have that many users.
Reddit has also been around for a long time (in internet time) - since 2005. And it's survived many PR fires too.
YouTube is the only one I see who is really trying to make it work. Instagram worked it out by placed ads for the most popular models.
And a key sin of all these sites is they think the content is theirs. It's not. Stop trying to regulate it to be what you want. It is what it is and you should be thankful, very thankful, they chose your site to host it. But this doesn't seem the case. The reddit admins in particular seems to hate a large part of their content-creating user base.
Twitter? Facebook? HN?
Maybe people just aren't in it for the money.
I'm (obviously) not the target market, but I absolutely detest disingenuous behaviour like this.
It has bred surprising resentment in me! I'm plotting a Yelp killer in the back of my mind now.
/takes off tinfoil hat
I do not want to have to download a different apps for each vendor, that's why we invented browsers. If the your browser experience sucks, fix it, don't push your mobile apps on people!
But yes, I find this highly annoying also.
I use their old mobile site and it's fast to load and easier to use. I hope they don't sunset it...
It requires no permissions and its style is delightfully basic and compact. It's my preferred way of redditing these days.
IMHO the only way to use Reddit on a mobile device is to request the desktop site. However, I recently opted into their new user profile thing which is completely broken on mobile (and you can't opt-out).
Reddit has been around for over 11 years. It's something to say about the loyalty of their community.
Their ability to target advertisements towards specific subreddits could become a large source of revenue. Especially since advertisers can easily target those with those interests.
I think it's different than facebook groups because subreddits are at the heart of the reddit ecosystem.
1. They have some weird policies about how they want their employees to work. At one point of time they were ok with being remote, then they moved everyone to SFO or told them to pound sand. 2. Scaling issues: Seems like that's an after thought and only gets addressed "when it happens"* (Never thought put in after the fact) 3. The Modmail.. it's bad when you're dealing with lots of it. There are features completely lacking. (Like searching, or a CRM for users and how they contacted the mods) 4. The non-obvious spam.. it's gotten worse now that they took down r/spam.
Keeping in mind this has remained a mystery to me ever since Facebook didn't sell for a million dollars an eon ago. Facebook's founder is today worth some ridiculous sum of money. Why is that? I'd have sold Facebook for a million dollars and then just made another website. What am I missing. YouTube sold for some amazing sum ages ago to Google, who has from my understanding still not turned a profit with it.
Since I am clearly so out of touch please make the explanation easy to understand.
For Reddit, it's one of the biggest communities online (maybe the world?) - there are many ways to leverage and monetize that even if they haven't figured out all the optimal ways to do that yet, the perceived value is enough to convince investors in its future.
Excuse me, Facebook revenues were not that high at a 1m valuation. Nobody would sell something that earns $32B/yr for 1m, I'm dubious that it earns that much money and I'm curious about why, if so, that is.
To answer your question as to why, Facebook is an advertising company. People pay to publish ads, they pay more for highly targeted ads which is what Facebook offers.
If someone were to straighten out Reddit not only would they be profitable but they'd be Facebook level profitable.
And if you're having a hard time understanding why that is, look at it this way: imagine a newspaper that was read by 10% of the US population as well as a huge amount of people overseas. They'd be the most valuable property in news by far. Especially because they demographics skew heavily towards 18-35-year-old men.
Reddit being the fourth most visited website in the US has the potential for people and companies to reach huge audiences. I can see where people are stuck in the mentality that places like this are just "another website". But the point is now these places are reaching unprecedented scales on an order of magnitude higher than the traditional webpages of the late 90's early 2000's that they can be huge businesses themselves.
"If I just capture ONE PERCENT of this nine figure market, I'll be rich!" -standard entrepreneurial slide deck
The paid rate would be well under 1%. Potentially an order of magnitude lower than that.
Also, good luck getting r/Frugal to pay for that. This would be a horrible business model for Reddit.
1. Reddit already has competitors, and lots of them. By putting a 'pay to join' barrier up, they just send said competitors more users which gives sites like Voat a huge boost in popularity.
2. It's also competing with online forums and community sites, the vast majority of which are free. Will people really spend money to talk about say, video games or R/Gaming or R/Games when tens of thousands of forums for the same topic exist and are open to join for free? Perhaps not, which would give the likes of IGN, Gamespot and NeoGAF a huge boost among many others.
3. $12 is a lot of money for some Reddit users. For example, people in poorer countries/where the local wages are lower, people without a steady job or career and kids/teens in general.
4. Reddit's entire popularity is dependent on the work of its users. If they can't afford it or leave, then the site will lose out on future popular content, and likely enter a popularity death spiral.
It would be interesting to see some potential marketplace addons or payment processing.
Thus reddit could long term replace or absorb Etsy and maybe maybe Craigslist.
Steemit "Your voice is worth something" https://steemit.com/
Of all the supposed reddit-killers that have been put forward, this is notable because of the funding mechanism, and because everyone there seems so damn excited. However, a lot of the most popular articles seem to be about... Steemit itself.
Now think of all the revenue streams you get with the Minecraft intellectual property.
Also, Minecraft's community is way less volatile. A glorified forum can die and become worthless real quick, if you don't play it right.
They don't have to pay dang for that I'll be happy to oblige, this is a toxic comment because of that last bit, essentially you are just stirring the pot and baiting the moderators.
As for the value of HN to YC: it's a recruiting and marketing machine the likes of which you'll rarely find for any kind of money, I suspect that no matter what Dan and Scott are paid it is well worth it to YC.
Here is what Mr Huffman has to say on this topic:
Steve's tone here is pretty clearly tongue-in-cheek.
Apparently 6 percent of internet users in the United States use Reddit in their spare time [1]. It is probably the same in Canada, Australia and the UK.
If we assume $0.25 in revenue per month per user and 20 million users, that's revenue of $60 million per year.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/443332/reddit-monthly-vi...
https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/4mv578/affil...
So many ways that this can be unpacked. Bravo!
I know reddit gets a lot of flak for shit-posting content, especially during and after the recent US elections, but it has huge potential to become a consistent part of a users media consumption & participation diet.
It's really addictive.