Reddit Convinced Roughly 6,000 Users To Subscribe So Far | Hacker News Reader

Reddit Convinced Roughly 6,000 Users To Subscribe So Far

techcrunch.com

28 pointsJarekS17 comments

I think reddit made a mistake in setting the default as a one time donation rather than a recurring one. You want to get people to commit to a relationship when they are thinking about it and are motivated.

I donated, but who knows if I will even remember to think about it next month or next year?

It feels a bit like they're squandering a great moment of user and media attention. When they introduce a more substantial plan, the attention and enthusiasm won't quite be there.

I was really surprised they didn't launch a fark style "TotalReddit" with a monthly subscription fee.

Learn from them - allow the subscription to be giftable so popular users get memberships from people who dont mind paying a lot per month. A recurring payment, not a 'donation' to a massive corporation. Have a separate subreddit for these pro users where the non paying users can't access.

With their large core of highly active users, I would hazard a guess this should generate them 500k annually.

Still - with their insanely high numbers of pageviews they should be able to monetize that traffic reasonably well. Their ad model just seems to work against normal advertiser campaigns, and they stated they didn't have anyone in sales until recently. This seems so bizarre to me - most big corps monetize products into the ground leveraging their existing ad channels.

They have a hugely loyal user base. I think they have their attention whenever they want it.

They where clearly running this as a bit of customer development. They had no idea what people would pay, how many people would pay, and whether or not the thing would work. Their goal right now is to put some numbers around those metrics and see what they get.

After all, they're part of Conde Naste. It does seem rather strange to be donating to a site with such a huge backer behind it.

I think you'll see them roll out something much more sophisticated in the coming months.

I have spent more on Reddit (via this donation) than I have on print subscriptions (Wired and others) for the last 3 years.

Go figure...

I wrote this comment somewhere else:

--------------------------------------

They had 8 million unique visitors in last month:

http://www.reddit.com/r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu/comments/co29o/c....

To put things in to context, reddit ran a haiti donation campaign which was heavily promoted through their ad spaces and blog postings and individual "donation drive threads" and they raised $185k from 3783 users over a period of ~30 days. They broke their first 100k within 12 hours. So if they got 6000 people to donate within 48 hours or so, that pretty damn good, over next few weeks as they add subscription only features its bound to get much much higher number as it gets promoted more.

http://dri.convio.net/site/TR?pg=fund&fr_id=1030&pxf....

I can't help but suspect that part of reddit's revenue problem just comes from how they display adds on the site. Instead of lots of relevant text adds, there's only one or two big graphic adds somewhere in the right column of the page.

I wonder if their revenue would change any if they arranged their pages to work more like Google search and email, with a string of text ads down the right side.

Breaking news: users pay for services they use.

All kidding aside, if I were still active on reddit, I wouldn't mind paying a monthly fee if I really loved the content. I used to spend a crapload of time on there before going cold-turkey, so at the peak of my usage, I would confidently say the site was worth at least a few bucks per month to me. Part of the reason is that I'm no longer a student and I've got disposable income. I wonder how many other people on the net also realize that their is a "cost" to their using the site, and that the cost is something they'd actually be willing to pay for.

I will never donate.

why not? (not judging, just wondering)

Conde Naste is a huge corporation, and if they want to let their purchase go down the toilet... well, I'm sorry, but I won't be picking up their slack.

I wouldn't donate either for those reasons, but one thing to keep in mind is that the codebase running reddit is open source: http://github.com/reddit/reddit

They pushed to the public Git in a month, but the donations users are making will go towards improving that codebase. It can be used to deploy your own (and hopefully more scalable) version of reddit.

But what if the semantics change and it's called "Subscribing"? Does that affect your assessment? I think a lot of folks are treating this as a donation (which is a side-effect of them using PayPal for this) and that's tainting their perception of what this is all about.

I would not subscribe either. Reddit can easily make enough money from these 280m pageviews a month without resorting to these measures.

Wow - you're awesome. Fly that flag!

I donated. I'm not a huge reddit user, but I certainly appreciate their candor and what they are doing.

I think social news is ultimately no good, however.

Interesting to see that only less then 0.1 percent of Reddit users donated. Is there really no alternative for ad revenue in content startups?

There seem to be some missing pieces to your logic. The people making donations are making donations equivalent to a very large number of ads. The donations are equivalent to a fairly large number of ad clicks, let alone impressions. I'm not sure how this proves that ads are the only way to go, when it was this "easy" to raise the equivalent of millions (probably billions) of page views in a day.

This is why I'm uninterested in subscription Hulu for ~$10 a month; with my viewing habits and never-click-on-ads behavior there's no way the ad revenue for my viewing could possibly top $.50 for a month, but for that $.50 they're willing to do grave damage to my viewing experience. Ads don't make much money at all; it's not hard to make up for a lot of ads if people are directly giving you cash.

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