Comment by vaksel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vaksel | Hacker News Reader

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of course reddit is monetizable...all it takes is flooding it with ads

768x90 adsense unit just below the submission title alone would probably make reddit instantly profitable.

and that doesn't take into account the premium google adsense ads.(imagine if a random #1-#5 url title from the top was an adsense ad?)...one that had the exact font style as regular reddit ads. Those just browsing, wouldn't even notice the little gray "powered by Google" text.

then add CPM based ads...maybe something that would play on mouseover...those tend to bring in the big bucks.

or just sell advertising directly for some brand awareness campaigns. Honda, Walmart, McDonalds.

And boom...you got a profitable "community".

So there is no reason for Conde Nast to sell reddit(especially at a loss)...if they were interested in generating more revenue, they could do it at a flip of a coin.

Sure it would piss off a lot of users...but it's not like people would abandon a site, just because there are a few more ads present.

These suggestions, while normal on any other site, wouldn't work on reddit.

The real problem reddit has is that it's community, which can be amazing at times, has grown used to a great user experience when it comes to advertising - the lack of it that is. Just ignore the box on the right and the occasional sponsored link in the top box. Should a flash-based ad appear in the right-hand box there'll be a front-paged topic on it in an hour. reddit has treated it's users well, but they baulk at the slightest change in that - and herein lies the real problem to monetising reddit. reddit has to monetise while keeping it's community happy. Since community happiness and advertising seem to be pretty much polar opposites it seems to be impossible.

What I'd do is increase advertising aggressively for non-logged in users, reduce it greatly for registered users and keep the option to remove it completely for gold members. Hopefully those that really hate advertising would sign up for gold, however there is probably a correlation between those that make the most noise about advertising and those that wouldn't do that as they don't believe in paying for things on the internet - completely unfounded but a gut feeling.

> Sure it would piss off a lot of users...but it's not like people would abandon a site, just because there are a few more ads present.

Being a technical audience AdBlock (already is but) would be widely used rendering it useless. I know reddit was monitoring adblock usage at some point - I'd like to know the results of that.

Vaksel has it right though. And of course it would work on reddit. Just slap a link underneath it that says 'click here if you don't want to see these ads'. That goes to the payment page. And offers you a 'you're a cheapskate' option that disables the ads without payment.

Positioning reddit as poor and hard to monetize is a fantastic strategy if you want to buy it back some day.

Why is it necessary to keep the users happy? So some will leave, but others will join. They are big enough that if they loose some, they'll be OK.

And actually I don't think they'll leave anyway.

They'll use adblock? So? What do they have to loose? You are worried that users will block ads, and the solution is not to run any?

It's a user driven site. At millions of people it's obviously not entirely personality driven, but still the site is driven by the actual individual people who submit and comment. They generate not just the content but the tone of the site, which is what keeps people coming back. You can't treat them like a straight up commodity that can be swapped in and out.

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