Reddit needs help
blog.reddit.com
blog.reddit.com
Here are the things they can do: 1. Place more ads. I don't buy the notion that many reddit users run ad-blockers. Even half of them do, you still get 140M/month page views. 2. Get Google AdSense, to place content-related ads. 3. Sponsorship. Have companies to sponsor some subreddits and add companies promotion and events. 4. Paid submission, clearly marked so. Company ad and product/service announcement can go there. E.g. all the webhosting promotion deals going on now. 5. Create some deal/coupon/onsales subreddits. Have companies feed them and pay for them. Rather than just having user-generated content, have companies generated content as well, and get paid for them. 6. CPA revenue sharing. Give redditers some percentage of discount when they go to a merchant's site to purchase something from a reddit link. Reddit takes a cut. It's a win-win-win setup, merchant sells a product minus the marketing cost which becomes the redditers' discount and reddit's share.
There are so many ways to skin this cat. They are sitting on a good problem to have. Why are they fumbling on this?
The big problem is that we spend most of our time just keeping the site up and don't have time to focus on these ideas, and Conde is unwilling to invest.
We're hoping the reddit gold money gives us the flexibility to bring in the talent we need to make some of those ideas happen.
If I had to monetize reddit right now, I would throw up some CPM ads from a premium display network, and then begin aggressively going after big brand advertisers and media buyers. This might mean spending money and hiring at least one ad sales person- but the investment will recoup itself many times over when media buys from big brands start coming in.
Right now, reddit is doing a TERRIBLE job of managing ad inventory, particularly remnant inventory. It also doesn't look easy for advertisers to place ads on reddit. I see a contact form for more information about advertising, but where is your media kit? User demographics? Not all ads are bad, only untargeted ones are. Why aren't there ads for Newegg, or Snorg tees, or collegehumor, etc on reddit? You're in a position to demand premium CPM from advertisers and you're squandering the opportunity.
Right now the ad I see on the front page is "advertise on reddit". This is a terribly wasteful use of remnant impressions, as 99% of your users won't be interested in buying ads, and there is no reason to show them this ad. It will take a few minutes to fill that remnant inventory with a reputable brand ad from a display network.
I understand that you don't want to piss off your users with ads, but Digg manages to generate revenue with strategically placed banner ads without any outcry from users.
I think this problem isn't unique to reddit- it seems like a lot of startups run exclusively by engineers have trouble monetizing intelligently, even when they get significant traffic.
My email is my profile if you want to chat about this further, I can send some links to the kinds of offers redditors might respond to or help you reach out to media buyers who might be interested in doing large buys on sites like reddit.
By the way, reddit can really learn from Demand Media sites like Cracked, who are very very good at monetizing the same type of low quality social media traffic.
il lays out exactly what they need to do, so there isn't much else to suggest. Simply set up some ad placements on the site and get set up as a publisher with the ad network of their choice. The network does all the sales. (Edit: Later on, they can get into do their own direct sales, sponsorships, etc.) They actually were signed up as a publisher for an ad network for a while, I think, because I remember some ad taking over the screen and everyone freaking out. Maybe that scared them away from the idea because they couldn't control the ad types, I don't know.
I don't know what their mobile numbers are, but they need to get set up as a publisher with a mobile ad network too, such as Ad Mob, Millennial or Quattro.
And since they don't know how anything works, they need to get a few thousand dollars and hire a consultant to explain it all to them. I know they are sensitive about pissing off users, but I suspect that their conversations with Conde Nast and any ad network have ended up in frustrated conversations that go nowhere because they don't understand each other. They need a marketing consultant that understands both worlds to bridge the communication gap. Yes, I'm available.
That said, they should immediately experiment w/ adsense, pubcenter, ideas ala stack overflow of embedding amazon referrals onto all books (not at all obnoxious IME), and some of the better display advertisers. Most of these are free and come with basically no commitment so why not. Also, they should embed quantcast's tracking pixel to get some idea about their demographics in a much cheaper fashion than comscore (NB: this could be misconstrued as an advertisement but I think it's good advice.)
Tell them your priority has shifted from gaining market share (page views) to bigger margin (profit=revenue-cost). Business people like increasing margin. And tell them you need to do a number of experiments to figure out what work, which cost additional money. Tell them there are two options: 1. give a new budget for monetization while keeping the existing operational budget, which is already thin in keeping the current site SLA. 2. Cut the operational budget in half, reduce site SLA, and divert the other half to monetization. Reducing SLA means having less servers, less operational staff, slower site, more crash, less visitors coming in, and some unpopular moves to increase conversion. But that's ok since as part of the plan you've stopped seeking for market share.
Be bold and ask more for a new budget. Say you need 20 more racks initially, 9 sales, 2 marketing, 2 biz dev, 4 more engr, and 3 managers. And need 20 more backend servers for the new initiative; dealing with merchants aren't cheap. You need the sales guys to sign up merchants, the marketing guys to figure out what work and manage ad campaigns, the biz dev guys to recruit big merchants like Dell or Amazon and managing ad inventory, and the engineers to build up the merchant facing infrastructure.
Excite them by painting huge upside monetization potential, which is true. Targeted CPC can be very lucrative, like minting money. Online merchants typically will budget 10%-15% on marketing, which is what pays CPC. Think how big the online ecommerce is and take 10% of that. That's why those merchant specific subreddits, deal/coupon, whatnot are so important because the redditers clicking out from those links are very qualified leads for the merchants who are willing to pay dear money for them.
If Conde is still unwilling to invest, then that's just life. Stop investing in increasing operational capacity. Accept the fact that site will run slower and have less visitors. That's fine. That's the max capacity of the site given the budget. Just enjoy the ride. And wait until Conde sells it to someone else who's willing to take it to the next level.
I really think targeted Ads are the way to go. Hell, I wouldn't even mind filling out information to help target ads.
It's incidentally what I think 4chan is missing too. Not necessarily for /b/, but the domain oriented boards coupled with some geoip would make for some pretty targeted ads. I think it's a pretty big loss not letting the little guy spend his $100 if he wants too.
As a registered user you know all the stories I've clicked on, all the stories I've voted for, and the sections I'm following, and with all this information you can't do something meaningful like put an ad or a "suggested link" for a product or service I'd like. I see links to the most random crap ever.
Why is it so hard to apply some sort of affinity metric to the advertising problem?
The sad truth is that if Reddit doesn't advertise, if the developer time is simply spent putting out fires, then it will end up being an irrelevant property. There is an amazing community there, which is a credit to what the site has managed so far, but that community will simply migrate to a better platform. It happened with Digg, it happened with Slashdot, and sadly it is inevitable that it will happen to Reddit unless some big changes are made.
Although I find many aspects of Facebook to be in outrageously bad taste, or rudely invasive, the one thing they've managed to do as a company is grow, build out, and become highly profitable. There are a lot of things Facebook does that are worth studying in meticulous detail, deconstructing and re-implementing, from their process, to their features, to their strategy to maintain growth. Their capability to execute on complicated technical problems is spectacular.
If Conde is unwilling to invest, maybe the best plan is to seek investors to buy out the property and make it an independent venture that's more focused on the site.
I think in a month we made enough for a cup of coffee.
Then, Google payments have been declining for a long time. We tried AdSense and I STILL haven't made enough to get Google to send a check (nice how they'll hang on to your $80 to the end of time, hmm? Wonder how much free advertising Google scams that way). Then, we switched to our own ads and make approx. 800 times as much per day (not an exaggeration).
On the other hand, if only we could charge people for comments we hate! The internet would get so much better...
I heard this moment described as the "where is the land" moment. The crew has been sailing the ocean for a long time and they're running on slim hope. They grumble, then complain, and finally they confront the captain and say, "You promised us land. Where is the land?!"
This doesn't look like a good resolution to the "where is the land" moment. Why decide to plead for cash? It's the business model of last resort.
So yeah, this is definitely a cry for help. Unfortunately, it's one that reminds me a lot of the drowning article. I think this is Reddit grabbing its users and trying to climb on top of them.
http://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/cnth8/making_...
I think the best outcome would be that this is a one-time weird thing that happened before they found a real revenue model. That wouldn't be unprecedented at all, although every time I can think of, this happens before the founders sell to a large company who can monetize well. For example, I donated to faqs.org when it was just some guy, and now it's owned by some site aggregator I've never heard of. Which is fine with me, because I just wanted to keep it around.
But assuming this works spectacularly, doesn't this just make Reddit completely illiquid? How can you go about selling a company based on revenues that are primarily free-will gifts? What would you sell, a share of profits from people just giving the company money? And what would you tell your donating customers who have zero ownership? Maybe that's all okay, or maybe I don't get it -- is there some way for this to succeed that I'm missing here?
I just can't believe this is where you go to before exhausting everything else, though. Just up and asking your customers to give you money like this has got to change your relationship, just like lending or giving money to a friend, right? I have to say I am fascinated to see how this plays out.
When taken out of context, that sounds remarkably absurd. ;-)
It's an interesting development, simply because most businesses throughout history have demanded that you give them money before you receive service. Or they bill you afterwards with the full force of law behind their threats. Very few will give you the service first and then ask nicely for money.
I'm hoping that it works out, simply because if it doesn't, I'd bet that we won't see very many businesses using this strategy in the future. OTOH, I have no plans to subscribe - Reddit just isn't worth all that much to me.
The thing that's interesting is that they're clearly willing to go for the donation angle. Again, the line is so thin that you wonder why they don't just announce they're selling you a digital doodad for an inflated price with the understanding that it's essentially a donation. It's something that works for PBS selling $100 DVDs but maybe the worry is that it triggers the "outrageous price" receptor...
I don't know if it's the right move.
I think you misunderstood the mantra. It really is "users first, flip it later". Let the next sap deal with it.
We've seen that play out time, and time, and time again. They got their payout, hang around for a while, and then split off.
I see lots of people bashing reddit and from a glance at the Frontpage I can see why. But the real good stuff is in the subreddits.
I'd also donate to HN too, if asked.
Just today I was being told to wait 10 minutes between postings...even though I'm definitely not a spammer, and have very positive karma (2000 after about 3 months).
Personally, I would pay $5/mo for premium reddit.
If I may ask, what did we do to lose you?
This is not something reddit can fix, and I fear that reddit will meet the same fate that digg has recently met. Both digg and reddit gained users at a steady pace, then skyrocketed in users and plummeted in intellectual value. On both sites users complained about how the site had changed but no one listened or cared. Eventually, as all the intellectually curious users left, the users that remained realized they are no better than 4chan and began looking for a new home as well. I believe this is an inevitable cycle for all social news websites. I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years I am fleeing Hacker News for the same reason.
I'd love to hear what some of the reddit admins think about how reddit has changed over the years, seeing as you all have had a better perspective than anyone else on reddit's evolution.
Good luck monetizing reddit, I will most likely donate some to show my appreciation for all reddit has provided me for the last couple of years.
However I doubt HN will follow, because unlike digg, slashdot and reddit, PG has shown no interest in gaining traffic at the expense of quality (indeed, he has called for the front page to be splashed with Erlang links, precisely so as to get those who wouldn't fit with the site to go elsewhere).
HN seems to be very good about accurate moderation. If the site ever reached the popularity of Reddit I think it would change.
Today's reddit is pretty mainstream, and, aside from a few subreddits, the content doesn't interest me much. The subreddits that do interest me have similar content to HN, and I already find myself spending too much time reading and discussing stories here when I should be working on my product.
I don't think reddit can be "fixed" so that I would return to be a heavy user again, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
At a certain point I think you just get tired. I can't count the number of times that I've posted a straightforward technical response, then downvoted, and said that my opinion is worthless unless I provide sources and that the commenter is a highly paid consultant so he knows what he is talking about.
For example, just about a month ago it looked like someone was confused about a basic systems issue. I posted with a quick comment about the nature of optimization in the memory hierarchy which featured a well-known result in standard CS literature. You know, there are times when I don't mind digging through IPDPS or the ACM for proper citations, but a lot of the time I resent the fact that the argumenter didn't even take the time to do some basic research about the topic. As I said, I get tired.
Above here, I said that I would pay you $5 a month, and I would...but the only reason for that is that you I've talked to you on here (hacker news) before. To me the people runnign reddit are real. To me, you're a friend and I'm throwing $5 into the can that is duct-taped to your kegerator because you let me drink it for free...
...but for most people? What does reddit offer me that I can't get elsewhere? Honestly, a lot of the submissions have gone completely to shit. /r/pics? /r/askreddit? /r/iama? I'm not saying that it is your fault, but there isn't, at least to me, any value there.
Granted, and I'm sure you could look in your logs to see how much I visit your site (it's a lot), but if it went away...would I be sad? Uhhh...maybe a little bit, but not really. Personally, beyond having talked to you here, I don't feel much of a connection to you guys, and I don't feel much of a connection to the community.
Again, I'm not saying that this is exactly your guys' fault, just that it has happened.
One service that I do pay for is usenet, even though I almost never use it (my provider gives me 10 gigs a month and I think I have about a half a terrabye of available transfer hat has just rolled over for the last 5 years or so.) I pay for it because it makes me happy to see what the people at my provider (easynews) are doing. The reason that I signed up to begin with is because I saw them as a mirror on sourceforge. To me, although this is probably completely incorrect, they're fighting the good fight, and I want to support that.
But what are you guys doing to make me voluntarily buy you a beer every month? Reddit doesn't give me anything that I can't get from here, or fark, or slashdot, or my own website. Again, I'll pay you guys $5, but I'm the exception.
To me, you have to ask yourself what you guys have done to make yourselves stand out. If the donation is strictly voluntary, what motivation do I have to give it.
I'll tell you that one reason I am a totalfarker is that Drew Curtis seems like a real guy to me. Other than you, I have no idea who is behind reddit (spez and kn0thing, but I haven't talked to them in a long while).
Again, please don't misunderstand what I'm saying. I love you guys, I'm addicted to your site, I love it...but am I the norm?
What? /r/iama is one of the best things that happened to reddit. Sure, most of the submissions are shit, but some are golden.
> What does reddit offer me that I can't get elsewhere
The community. Most of the value is in the comments.
---
About usenet, you could try http://www.astraweb.com/
I bought the once-off 180gb plan. Text isn't even counted. It's going to last me years.
Well, and there's the problem. The SNR on most of the larger subreddits has gotten absolutely terrible lately. I went through a couple of weeks ago and unsubbed from most of the larger reddits and nearly all the self-post only reddits because I simply don't have the time or inclination to dig through 100 garbage headlines for the one golden post.
>The community. Most of the value is in the comments.
The "community" on reddit is incredibly forced in nature. It's almost entirely based around memes that have been coopted from elsewhere and feel-good circle jerking.
Oh, and let's not forget when the community decides to rage about something, jumps to conclusions, and often as not ends up being completely wrong about it, but only after a significant portion of the users have taken to harassing or otherwise disrupting some innocent person's life.
There's still value to be had on reddit, I just increasingly feel like it's being pushed out more and more to the smaller subreddits.
No submission I make gets any traction.
Any story I find interesting already has 500+ comments. If I add a comment, nobody replies or votes on it. It's just lost in the noise.
I'm not looking to be an karma superstar, I just want a place to actively engage with some other Internet folks from time to time.
Reddit got too big. Perhaps HN will one day too.
I still browse reddit all the time, I just can't use it.
Plus, the "all" frontpage is now a cesspool of the internet (IMO).
Plus, twitter has a pretty good (and addictive) information flow nowadays.
actually I think for reddit it'd be a little harder for comparison...because with those forums, the people know they are supporting small time folks...with reddit, they'd be asking people to donate money to a for profit billion dollar corporation.
But that begs the question: if I'm paying reddit, why am I not giving back to the content authors that reddit linked to?
Hopefully when you visit their sites, you are involving yourself in whatever their method of monitization is. Subscriptions, viewing ads, whatever it is.
"...we can right now only offer you our undying gratitude and an optional trophy on your userpage."
Yikes. What else could reddit offer for subscribers other than a png?
Can reddit or similar platforms find a good way to generate revenue? Obviously ads and merchandise (t-shirts, etc) aren't doing it alone here.
I'd know: my web based MMO, Forumwarz is one. People can pay to buy some kinds of "E-Peen" which is our version of badges.
It was amazing experience that I wouldn't trade for anything, and I met so many amazing people and learned a lot, but eventually I realized that earning half of what I was capable of earning as a developer wasn't a good idea in the long term.
I now maintain the site on a part time basis along with a half dozen volunteers. The site still pays its operating costs but there isn't too much left over.
My goal is to run the site as long as possible, which is a lot more affordable now that it isn't doing 40M pageviews a month.
Isn't their code base open source? More money may mean less time spent fixing slowdowns and more time spent on the core code. If you're using their code for something of your own that could be one motivating factor.
http://unknownworlds.com/ is a great example. When it was still just a halflife mod, and the creator wanted to work on it full time while bootstrapping the company, he asked for donations to get a special icon in game and playtesting access. There was an incredible outpouring of support and it kept them in the green.
Now, to fund the stand-alone sequel, they are taking preorders far in advance to help the development, with an option to pay $20 extra for the game to get special black armor in-game and their eternal gratitude. Almost all of the preorders opted to pay extra, mostly out of thanks for the years they spent playing the first game for free.
Sometimes the worth of something, and the spirit of those pursuing it, is worth reward/support in and of itself.
Joking aside, I think there are a lot of people in Africa, Haiti and, sadly, many other places in the world, who would get a lot more out of a few dollars than my daughter, who will hopefully never experience anything like the sort of privation many people see every day there.
Maybe that's a little harsh, but we spend money EVERY friggn day on things that could be invested in Africas problems. Making this point leads to nowhere and Africa's problems are far more complex anyway. There's defiantly nothing wrong in donating a few bucks to Reddit.
(also pacifism is neither extreme nor wrong)
I think there was a little miscommunication there.
DavidW wrote
> [My daughter] doesn't have such extremist political views ("pacifiers for all!" is probably the most controversial).
I'm pretty sure he was talking about one of those false nipple things that you stick into a baby's mouth in order to soothe it, e.g.: http://www.google.com/images?q=pacifier
I think I've heard this called a "dummy" in UK-English, and I often hear them referred to by various brand names.
I don't think DavidW was trying to make a political comment, he was just making a little joke about his infant daughter, or at least I assume so.
You know, maybe the most militant thing most Redditors ever do is posting commenting online. If you're a pacifist (which is commendable imho) why write so aggressively?
If they offered a real premium service, I wouldn't make that argument. For instance, no one, least of all myself, complains about lwn.net being a for-pay service, despite their primary market being a bunch of open source guys.
Also, I don't have an iPhone, and do ride my bike a lot, thanks: no need for the hostility.
He didn't even mention pacifism.
DRI donation page: http://dri.convio.net/goto/reddit
I'm sure someone like Hernando de Soto has the sort of charity that works on things like political infrustracture.
They say:
"The big problem is that we spend most of our time just keeping the site up and don't have time to focus on these ideas, and Conde is unwilling to invest."
Sorry, but I'm not picking up Conde's slack without anything in return.
But at the same time, Reddit is much closer to home for redditors. If I spend 30-60 minutes a day on Reddit, and like it, it has a very measurable impact on my life. It is in my own interest to keep it running. Whether it is a large corporation or not is beside the point. And by donating, I can become a "part" of the site, I can invest in its future (including upcoming premium features, if all goes well). In some sense, donating to Reddit is extremely capitalistic.
Contrast with charity, which is non-capitalistic and much "better" in the sense of ultimate moral good, but where I'm never likely to see my $5 again or even hear how it was used.
The fact of the matter is that people do in fact value giving $5 to a giant corporation for leisure activities more than they do giving that same exact $5 to some person in need in Africa.
(That isn't to suggest they aren't giving a different $5 to Africa, just that they are rich enough to do both.)
Also they really have very few adverts at all on the site, and those that are there, are tucked away not very noticable.
Say you get an eCPM of $0.05 or something (A guess for that sort of site so I may be way off)... That'd work out to $14k/month in ad revenue for 280m pageviews.
http://www.codexon.com/posts/the-percentage-of-people-using-...
So, actually, this could be an interesting experiment - the ad blockers slogan is often "I prefer to subscribe".
I hope it works out that way for them!
If Reddit immediately offered a subscription service and changed nothing else about their site ... I probably wouldn't subscribe at any price. Reddit is a bit of an occasional guilty pleasure for me, and if it went away, I would write that off as one less distraction. I'm aware that Redditors on the whole have accomplished some pretty great things in their own right, so something like that ought to exist, but I just couldn't justify the cost to me.
BUT! If Reddit required a paid subscription in order to post a comment or story, I would actually be more motivated to spend money on that. It would dramatically change the nature of the site, into one that I think would be more attractive -- to me.
That's just me though, and I'm not a very good example of any kind of business model. ;-) (Nor do I think Reddit actually should do this -- it would be a bad business move.)
Adblock would still work, but ad-rippers be reduced to a text only site.
Getting past adblock doesn't really help. Changing the userbase does, but it's a bit late for that :/
And Reddit never did try very hard to moneytize their site, obvious things like self-serve ads that can be specialized on a subreddit (which means that you can target /r/haskell with job ads - imagine how many adds you can get for the price of one recruiter), the ability to pay to have ads turned of, merch that isn't to benefit a charity, etc.
This way they'd get more or less guaranteed $3-4 CPM...the fact that reddit has 4 engineers and 0 sales people goes to show that they aren't even trying to monetize the site.
Look at their site, 2 total ads on the main page, one per comment page.
They could bump that to 5 per page without breaking a sweat. There's their revenue.
that's it...why can't they go to Honda and get them to pay them money to promote buying a Civic? or Coca Cola? etc etc/
The userbase is anti-consumerist. They HATE things like Coca-Cola. They hate TV. They detest adverts etc etc etc
Probably the situation is this: Advertising isn't very lucrative on Reddit, so Nast has told Reddit management that they must come up with some plan to steepen the profit curve, or they're toast.
And this is what they've come up with.
I can't remember who I'm quoting here, but it comes from someone in the Voluntary Simplicity movement and it really struck a chord with me:
>With your money you get to chose what exists in the world.
It's one of the the last truly democratic forms of voting. In some ways, consumerism is an unriggable election, with the market deciding (for better or worse - sometimes worse) what is allowed to thrive and what dies.
A few people have expressed the opinion that because Reddit is owned by a large corporation, that asking for donations is unjustified. The way I see it, they're creating value, and have a right to ask for payment for that. In exchange for your dollars, you get to see a great community continue existing in the world.
See the question at around ~27m into the video.
Yes it is true, they are more expensive than others, and if I were starting a new company I might not use them from the start, but they offer us one thing that no one else seems to be able to handle -- the ability to spin up a lot of heavy iron quickly to absorb sudden changes in traffic.
It's obvious that your work isn't being respected by your current employers.
Does reddit mean a lot to you personally?
Stay tuned. :)
> It's obvious that your work isn't being respected by your current employers.
Hmmm, I've never really thought about it that way before.
> Does reddit mean a lot to you personally?
It does. I've worked for reddit officially for over 3.5 years, and I've been friends with Steve and Alexis for almost 5 years.
I've watched reddit grow from a tiny site to the huge site it is now.
And when Steve and Alexis left, the put it in our hands to take good care of it.
It's like watching your friend's kid grow up, and then one day becoming their guardian.
reddit's been a big part of my life.
I wish it could just be taken non-profit and run it like like wikipedia with a fundraiser every year to keep it going.
It is simply that EC2 offers us the best bang for the buck for our requirements (one of the main ones being able to spin up a lot of iron very quickly).
Pretty much yes to both of these. With so few of us, the overhead of running it and moving to it just doesn't make sense at this time.
The pricing for bandwidth alone on EC2 is simply insane.
None of the VPS's can give us that many nodes that quickly.
Also, bandwidth is by far our lowest cost. It is less than 5% of our total bill.
I can't see why Reddit should be a particularly high CPU usage website. So perhaps time to optimize and swap out some things...
Now they're chumps for not putting a grown up in charge of converting 280 million page views/month and a dedicated community to enough money to support 4 engineers and a bunch of servers.
The comparison to Gruber etc is misleading, since Gruber never got bought by a major company. This is more like 30 Rock asking you to donate to NBC.
That's not how it happened.
> Now they're chumps for not putting a grown up in charge
I like to think of myself as a grown up.
> converting 280 million page views/month and a dedicated community to enough money to support 4 engineers and a bunch of servers.
This is the crux of the problem. Marketing and ad sales is out of our direct control and has been lacking, so we've had to resort to other options. Self serve advertising last year was one of them, and it has done us well. This is more extreme for sure, but our plan is to eventually go towards the optional subscription model (like Ars Technica or Fark).
Granted, you know better than me.
>I like to think of myself as a grown up
By "grown up" I just mean someone experienced with running the business side. I wouldn't call myself "a grown up" either in that sense, having never done that.
> Marketing and ad sales is out of our direct control and has been lacking
Sorry to hear that. Seems like a common story for startups. I think you guys could do well with a paid model like Metafilter's.
The people over at reddit have made two thing clear: that Conde Nast won't increase their budget unless they increase their revenue. And that their current budget is not enough for them to run reddit the way they would like.
I'm certainly not defending Conde Nast, nor will I blindly defend reddit. And I certainly don't expect any company to run a site the size of reddit out of charity.
I will donate, as I've been a long time reddit user who enjoys the site (though somewhat less as time goes on).
Our lawyers fear foreign laws and will not deal with them.
That being said, we are working on expanding into some of the other English speaking countries.
Being subjected to foreign laws can't be a huge concern, surely. Contracts for advertising (and, heck, almost any online service) specify the legal jurisdiction that applies to the transaction. If I live in Kazakhstan, buy some ads on a US site, there's not much I can do if I agreed to a US-based contract whether Reddit breaks Kazakhstani law or not.
I've played around with www.playframework.org, and in my tests it was a LOT faster than ruby, while offering many of the same benefits as Rails. I know Reddit is written in Python with Pylons, but I wonder if all those CPU cycles they sacrificed by using Python instead of Java wouldn't come in handy now?
I was recently involved with a project where we were able to reduce our server costs by an order of magnitude by switching from ruby to java.
1> rewrite your Ruby code in Java
But if this happens more then incidentally then you guys could easily be missing out on multiple 1k/month advertising deals by not offering a way to contact someone on the team.
It removes 99% of the shitheads and creates a great community. You can also buy upgrades like an avatar, no-ads, a custom title, personal messages, etc.
Unfortunately the last several years of SA have revealed that this model doesn't really scale either, at least with regards to maintaining a vibrant community and avoiding the Digg effect. I think they should have started raising the rates about 2004.
And reddit's revenue isn't great. The good news is, our traffic continues to grow by leaps and bounds.
Talk about doing it wrong.
When you have growth but no revenue, it's probably because you aren't asking your users to pay. That should be every website's first option - ask people to pay for the service they receive.
Paying users are great, un-paying users are a liability.
It's also a good illustration of what Joe Kraus said in his brilliant Startup School speech -- when you put your product into beta, put your business model into beta at the same time.
They could at least make their ad display scripts deposit tokens for the user via async requests, and throttle users who run out of them. It's a better way of thanking me for not running AdBlock than a PNG of the alien giving me the thumbs up.
Sometimes, free users increase the network effect; also, sometimes the longer they use the system, more likely they are to pay for it eventually.
2. You'll need to find me some stats that back up the point that there is a relationship between the length of time a user is on a site and their commitment to purchase. If this is true, all websites should see increased per capita conversion rates over time. I don't think this is the case, but please prove me wrong.
Reddit was (perhaps not intentionally) built to flip. Mission accomplished.
That it is weak sauce now just means you could buy it cheaper. If I had $5-10mm (+100% debt) sitting around and nothing better to do with my life for 2-4 years, I'd be seriously tempted to make an offer to Conde Nast.
- reddit game site with reddit comments and upvoting integrated into the site like kongregate, game sites can pull in some better revenue (indie game competitions, stats, leaderboards etc).
- reddit book or movie club where you take the revenue of the amazon lead or other store leads.
- make money off the porn communities, tier the submission process (lots of great companies get some funding from porn and noone will complain here).
- prominent donation link or pay it forward like flattr.
- deals for sponsorship such as takeovers on subreddits for movies, games, etc.
- deals for reddit flash mobs for buying a product or service at once or with code (queue people ready to buy a product, then find a retailer ready to give 10% off for redditors - could work with book/movie clubs above and digital goods like steam games).
- ...
If you can relate everything back to your core feature (awesome community) then it may just work.
Also, one thing that is nice with EC2 is that we can spin up a lot of big iron when we need to absorb new kinds of traffic. I can't do that in my own datacenter.
I'd definitely be interested in something like this, and I'm sure many other people would be too.
I'd be interested in helping optimize your pain points, as I'm sure many here and on reddit are. Yes, you'll get quite a ton of trash from people who have no clue by doing this, but maybe you'll get some smart pointers in a way that doesn't require you to get a new engineer spun up in six months (which, IMHO, seems far too long for a web product)
Not knowing anything about the deal (but knowing a bit about Conde's general disdain for the web) I'm still surprised that your biggest problem is an ad-sales framework.
At the same time, I always assumed that Reddit was one of the most future-forward components in Conde's portfolio, and that it could provide as much if not more intelligence value to its owners than it could via direct revenue.
This are totally off the cuff responses. I could easily be wrong about everything.
The memcache clears out, The cassandra's fail, the fault reporting system breaks. The new twitter fail whale. Let the pros do the sys admin thing.
Like Ted Zuiba says it, it not that they are not intelligent, the kind of problems that occur at large scales, they just don't have enough experience to know, anticipate and have preventive measures in place.
They should really talk to Google, to move their data on to the Bigtable and work on adding features.
(The site Reddit made for Conde Naste before they bought Reddit).
Celebs? Gossip? Woman demographics? non techie? Jeez you'd have been able to make millions...
http://web.archive.org/web/20071025012630/http://lipstick.co...
The site seems to have been killed and not used since 2007. Stupidly bad decision IMHO.
Even if you stuck up a crappy website on that domain and just sold lipstick it'd probably pay to run Reddit.
I will pay for that.
$6 / mo: + reddit.com email redirector
$12 / mo: reddit username appears in different colour on pages.
asking for one off donations isn't a business, you want predictable revenues. I'd pay $12/mo for reddit.
I think Reddit should contact a PE firm and do a buy out. They can't monetize because they don't have the resources.
Just compare reddit charity to Haiti fund and Digg doing the same thing.
Reddit: http://dri.convio.net/site/TR?pg=fund&fr_id=1030&pxf...
Digg: http://dri.convio.net/site/TR?pg=fund&fr_id=1030&pxf...
They both promoted it, they both blogged it in their official company blog. Kevin rose personally tweeted it to his 1million+ followers. And they got 4k measly dollars and Reddit got $185k, albeit reddit started few weeks sooner, but still....
I am not trying to make a reddit > digg derpity derpity derp argument, I am just saying that people greatly underestimate the power of "involved" community. Not a community by page views numbers ala Digg.
There's a connectedness there that simply does not exist for most online communities. Hell, I go to a weekly board games and hang-out night with fellow redditors in the area - no other internet community has ever compelled me to do that before.
Say I see a cool T-shirt that some charity is selling for $25. That's pretty steep for a T-shirt. I'd probably only pay around $15 for a T-shirt normally. But if I like the shirt and like the charity, I might buy it anyway. I view that as a $15 purchase and a $10 donation.
Stuff like that happens all the time.
If Reddit had not abandoned Lisp for Python, could the team have dodged this vicious cycle?
Today you can choose between Clozure lisp or Clojure, both of which runs the same on the different platforms and both of which are free.
Back then, the only way they could have pulled it of would be to use something like Lispworks or Franz lisp, both of which are super nice technologies that would be awesome to work with but they are also extreemly expensive (and I have no idea how they scale).
A few downsides, once you start charging me I'm going to gain some expectations. Downtime is going to be harder to excuse then it was before is just one example.
One of the main reasons we hesitated so long. We didn't want to let down the community, especially those that paid.
As always, we will do our best to keep the site up, and hopefully this new income will make it so we can afford the redundant servers we need to do a better job at it.
That was the main reason we didn't seek programming interns this summer -- it's a great thought, but would probably take too long to ramp them up.
First of all, thanks for your hard work on reddit. I'm myself quite addicted to some interesting subreddits for about 6 months.
I would like to answer on your issue with the 6 months problem that interns 'would have' if you pick one. If I'm right, you released a virtual machine with reddit installed, last month, on a blog post. I see no reason for _any_ intern for not being able to contribute to reddit from day 1.
Seriously, /r/programming and /r/coding are great, and I'm 110% sure you can find an intern which would know perfectly how reddit works (code related) and who would be very kind to help out.
This virtual machine already setup was a great idea, why not using it to your own goal ?
edit: s/internet/intern
Just some thoughts...
E-Mail is on my profile if you want to get in contact.
Reddit have ads plastered prominently on the site, Reddit TV, a 99 cent app, I assume merch (correct me if I'm wrong), free user generated content from a massive hardcore following, and millions of pageviews a day (too lazy to look up the exact number) - and yet they still can't make a go of it?
If so, that does not bode well for the rest of us.