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Comment by axod | Hacker News Reader

They have a userbase which is ridiculously hard to monetize (IMHO). I'd bet the % of adblock users on Reddit is way higher than the average. The Reddit crowd aren't your average mainstream user. It's a particular crowd (liberal anti-capitalism pro-cannabis etc etc) [Again, just my opinion]

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.

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Last year I measured ~65% of visitors from Reddit had adblock.

http://www.codexon.com/posts/the-percentage-of-people-using-...

That's only for people who visit your site, though, people from places like /r/programming. Let me tell you, there are divides between those who are savvy enough to understand places like /r/programming and those who aren't. I'd estimate reddit's overall adblock usage at being just the same as the rest of the news aggregation sites.

I'd bet the % of adblock users on Reddit is way higher than the average.

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!

Subscriptions are a funny thing. But first, I'm an AdBlock user, and I recommend it for my clients (http://www.robsheldon.com/adblockplus).

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.)

I think the ad blocker slogan is unofficially 'I'm an idiot who thinks that web sites and content appears magically without the creators requiring or deserving ad revenue for their work'

They should integrate their ad platform with their static image platform - ie, all logos, thumbnails, and ads are served from the same dir on the same host, perhaps with similar filenames.

Adblock would still work, but ad-rippers be reduced to a text only site.

It's trivial to get past adblock, but the fact that users use adblock means they're not the type of user you can monetize easily.

Getting past adblock doesn't really help. Changing the userbase does, but it's a bit late for that :/

I am not so sure about that - Reddit is one of the only sites that I turned adblock of on - their ads were too interesting and too funny to hide, which is an amazing accomplishment.

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.

Turning adblock off doesn't necessarily mean anything. The fact you install adblock at all, means you're not a good demographic in terms of advertising - even if you turn adblock off.

if your audience is hard to monetize, then you go for CPM advertising. That way you get big name brands that want to raise awareness about their products rather than convert users to buy a widget.

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.

If you put traditional (well paying) ads on Reddit, I think the userbase would revolt scream etc etc.

They'd scream, and there'd be a rash of "this sucks, I'm quitting" diaries and then like 5 people who were going to quit anyways would actually leave.

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.

wouldn't even have to do that, right now their ads suck...they are either "hey pay us $20-$30 to advertise on reddit", thanks for not using adblock, buying some reddit schwag, yay reddit, and once in a while you see Amazon or some anime shows ads.

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/

I don't use AdBlock very much, but I must admit that the "thanks for not using adblock" message made me to promise myself that I'll never use AdBlock on reddit.

Because the Reddit userbase they have cultivated is (IMHO) not a good one to advertise to.

The userbase is anti-consumerist. They HATE things like Coca-Cola. They hate TV. They detest adverts etc etc etc

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