Five ways to save Condé Nast's Reddit | Hacker News Reader

Five ways to save Condé Nast's Reddit

emediavitals.com

8 pointsmtsmith8512 comments

Take reddit non-profit and have pledge drives a la wikipedia.

Reddit is useful enough to be considered a common good/ public property.

Exactly. Why be "evil" when you have a community that would be very willing to support you on pure ideals.

Well, if I were Conde Nast, I might have an issue with just making it non-profit after spending a bunch to acquire it. Lotta people loosing jobs in the media space, and it would be difficult to convince me that a site with 280 million page views should just be written off. There's got to be a way to balance community needs with revenue generation.

I think reddit users would be hesitant to allow their beloved website to start selling data about them. One of the things that drives reddit is the anonymity, why would they want to give that up?

Also, I don't think the author understands the extent to which reddit ads are targeted. Most redittors I know have it whitelisted on adblock and actively click ads because they find them intriguing.

I agree that Reddit's community might balk at some of the ideas referenced in the article. In fact, I made mention of the Facebook privacy fiasco to highlight the issue. Also, I mentioned the opportunity to go to retailers instead of ad networks. I was thinking of it as a benefit. Imagine going to a retailer's Web site with products that you are interested in showcased on the homepage with discounts instead of random stuff that you are interested in. More like Get Glue (http://getglue.com/)

I actually signed up for a Reddit self service account in doing research for the article. While the Reddit system may do a lot to target the ads on its own, I found it incredibly rigid and lacking a lot of features that other services offer. The lack of features and the proprietary nature of the system preclude the ad service from reaching scale.

I agree about the reddit users -- they are a fun bunch when it comes to privacy! (and I mean that in a very loving way.)

But, Reddit has released data previously (http://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/bubhl/csv_dump_of...) and it seems the users were pretty fond of it. So why not some more, even more anonymized data?

Good article, short and to the point. I especially find the last one intriguing, rightfully pointing out that Reddit may be one of the few sites to store things that a user doesn't like, and it may be quite the competitive advantage opposed to other social sites that are trying targeted ads.

I have a feeling that redditors would not like having their like/dislike information sold.

Totally great point. What the user doesn't like would be hugely informative to marketers. They have a metric boatload of data (http://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/bubhl/csv_dump_of...) to use, and to take advantage of. I know the reddit community, and I worry about pissing off the independent nature of said community, but I think that Prescott makes some great points about what that data could be used for.

These are just five ideas that Reddit could start implementing to help towards generating more revenue. While this article is geared towards Condé, any site or web app owner could implement them. None of them are very painful to implement and could easily begin to payoff.

I read somewhere that sites like Gawker look to Reddit for 'cool' story-leads. I amy be over-reaching but Reddit can do syndication dwals/partnerships with Media compnaies for Daily 'Best of Reddit' placements.

Also, what happened to Reddit TV?

That's an interesting idea... Yahoo, AOL, and Demand Media would likely be interested in getting real-time data from Reddit, and being a data provider is a better business than providing commoditized advertising solutions.

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