280 million page views a month and they aren't breaking even to support 4 engineers? wtf
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.