Reddit's traffic grew by 300% in 2010 | Hacker News Reader

Reddit's traffic grew by 300% in 2010

reddit.com

124 pointsAqwis54 comments

Title's wrong. Growing by 300% means Reddit would be at 1 billion pageviews. Grow by 100%, you get 500 million. Grow by 200%, you get 750 million. Grow by 231.6%, you get 829 million.

They are not handling the load well, and it is getting bad enough to discourage me from commenting there. It was annoying but livable when it was just slow loading when reading, but lately it has progressed to errors when trying to post. That is a lot more annoying because then you've either got to give up on the post, or save a copy somewhere to try again later.

It's also losing the status of inboxes. That is, it will show the orange envelope meaning you've got a message (typically someone replied to one of your comments). You then click that to see the reply, and it just sits there not responding. If you give up and go elsewhere, it often has marked your messages as read, even though you never saw them.

I'd prefer if posting and dealing with the inbox were given high priority, even if it meant more "you broke reddit" messages when I try to read stories.

They still only have 4 engineers, and their lead engineer left. So, that's like 3 engineers and a trainee. To run a massive site with 120 servers and 830M pageviews/month.

Raldi commented on it here: http://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/efpn0/reddit_...

Basically, they don't have the human resources right now to go in and fix the code that worked for 100M pageviews and broke at 830M. They're working on fixing it, but it's a slow process. Keep in mind, even after its layoffs, Digg still has 10 times as many engineers, with far fewer users.

We're almost ready to hire a couple of really awesome folk. Then we have to train them. Then they can be useful and help us make the site faster and more stable.

We're just really constrained on human time right now.

so hire people you don't have to train. you have enough traffic to monetize a better team

Even the smartest person in the world will have to learn our architecture and codebase, our processes, our logins, our machine names, etc.

No matter how amazing they are, I'm not giving them the root password on the first day or letting them redo the databases or write major code changes.

Everyone requires training.

Not in our company. </sarcasm>

You obviously need Roger, the cokefiend. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2065416)

> Service Unavailable > The server is temporarily unable to service your request. > Please try again later.

Guess what, you're right.

Traffic in December exhibits weird patterns (lower for business sites and higher for leisure sites due to the holidays).

I wonder if they avoided a December 2009 to December 2010 comparison on purpose (or if they preferred the Jan-vs-Dec one to get a better growth).

Not quite as simple as business vs. leisure, but I agree that the only reason they'd chose Dec10/Jan10 not Dec10/Dec09 is to make the stats look more impressive.

Actually, they would have been more impressive if we did Dec to Dec. Our traffic is usually down in Dec.

We did it that way because we were reviewing 2010.

Then that's really odd, the way any business would normally review a year's performance is to compare December/December, because that's the best way to get a decent comparison without being influenced by factors such as "Our traffic is usually down in Dec." Same thing for other time periods - if you want to see how good traffic was over a weekend, you don't compare Sat/Sun to Thur/Fri, you compare Sat/Sun to the previous week's Sat/Sun.

  Our traffic is usually down in Dec.

Oddly, I've found that to be the case every year, across a range of non-business for-leisure websites.

We weren't trying to review our performance year to year though. We were just showing how the beginning of 2010 compared to the end.

All the media decided to make it a year over year comparison, which it was never intended as.

They would have been more impressive if we did Dec to Dec. Our traffic is usually down in Dec.

We did it that way because we were reviewing 2010.

I remember a few years back top bloggers and industry 'experts' talking about reddit being toasted in competition with digg. Amazing momentum after 5 years. Congrats.

At the bottom of articles on websites when I see share on digg and delicious icons I think "Oh my."

Amazon.toast

I wonder how much of that traffic is from folks who ditched Digg?

Judging by Quantcast, it's not correlated. Reddit has been steadily growing, and Digg just did a face plant.

Reddit has stated that Quantcast and Compete's numbers are pretty much flat wrong for them. You'd have to assume the same for digg.

http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/experts-misunderestimate-our-...

What about adplanner data?

https://www.google.com/adplanner/planning/site_profile?hl=en...

Seems to be right, as it comes from Analytics.

That shows a huge spike in traffic in late August and Sept, right around the launch of the digg redesign, unlike Quantcast and Compete ;-)

I for one venture to reddit more due to what digg has become

https://www.google.com/adplanner/planning/site_profile?hl=en... makes it look like Digg lost about 750,000 daily users over the last year, in the same time Reddit added 500,000.

Obligatory disclaimer, not causation, FSM pirates vs global warming correlation silliness.

Still, instructive to see how quickly you can destroy your own brand and boost a competitor.

We saw about a 30% increase right after v4 was launched, and about most of those (25% of the 30%, or 83% of the increase) stuck around a week later. It's been basically normal growth since then.

And revenue? Will we see more begging for money this year?

Reddit Gold is not really "begging". They allow you to set your own price for an enhanced set of features. While Reddit Gold is mostly about expressing your support for Reddit, it's not a straight up donation, and Reddit didn't spend two months with a banner at 25% screen height with a bearded kn0thing or ketralnis staring down the userbase.

http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/reddit-needs-help.html

set your own price

That was only the deal for the first couple of days; it now has a fixed price of $4 (or a postcard) per month.

We weren't really begging for money. We needed money, we let people know that, and then we let people set their own price because we had no idea what the price should be, so we crowdsourced it.

We can't talk about our revenue, but I'll just say, we're still here and will be here for a while yet.

Becoming more clear every day that either the site is short a few, maybe a dozen plus, servers. Or the design has reached an inflection point of some sort.

We don't need more servers, we need more people.

See here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/efpn0/reddit_...

The search: sucked => works part is us (IndexTank). Thanks Reddit for the mention!

I'm curious to know if it's reddit's GUi design/usability or it's content/community that keeps it a growing success.

For me, it's their design approach that i enjoy using, especially after reviewing their second project, hipmunk.

Interesting. I came to Reddit for the intelligent conversation compared to Digg. The commenting system was pretty great, as well as the subreddit system though, so I'd call it as a good mix of people and UI.

Eventually, I realized it was wasting my time like digg, just in a less obvious way. Also, the community had grown enough that those long joke threads and aggressive attempts at meme creation were hurting my enjoyment. These are not solvable problems on reddit in my opinion. I finally turned in the towel after an extremely long thread on how useless churches are in America: criticize all you want, (and I will certainly continue to do so), but churches feed and take care of homeless people and poor people in every county (and probably, town) of America.

My final solution was to add the following to my /etc/hosts file:

174.132.225.106 reddit.com www.reddit.com

This has saved me a lot of time. In exchange, I've missed (I imagine) many outrage-generating stories on US civil rights, a lot of great pictures of cats, and in exchange get to skip reading the perspectives of many, many 4chan alums.

The trick to post-2008 Reddit is to be very, very judicious about which sub-reddits you subscribe to. There are still quite a few gems. I've flirted with abandoning ship since the early 2009 hockey stick growth, but found peace by continuously weeding out sub-reddits that had gone bad. It's kind of like pruning a bonzai tree.

This is my go-to answer to anyone who complains about pun threads and whatnot. If you're running into that stuff, you're on the wrong subreddits. My discussions there are perfectly enjoyable since removing r/atheism, r/pics, r/reddit.com, etc.

I believed in that method, but in the end I'm still happier with my redirect. Signal to Noise ratio is WAY better. : )

There's another issue at play too, I feel. That is, Reddit doesn't change. Or, rather, it doesn't appear to. They add things (like subreddits or "gold") but the core mechanism rarely changes. The cost of changing people's muscle and visual memories is strongly underestimated.

Both, imho. Our design is based around giving tools for our users to create with (subreddits, self posts, commenting system etc) and letting them work their magic.

edit: unfortunately, we haven't got the benefit of a visible community on hipmunk - but that's a challenge for me to overcome as I try and build the same kind of fervent community on a site where no one can start a pun thread.

How many monthly uniques?

About 12 million last month. About 5 million last January.

Congrats Reddit! Wish you and Hipmunk greater success in 2011 :-)

Why thank you!

No mention of revenue or profit or how many millions they're paying Amazon for hosting.

Traffic is great but profit is better.

Any overflow effect on HN?

I for one found HN through Reddit.

Same. Given that HN was originally supposed to be part of Reddit, that's not surprising.

> Given that HN was originally supposed to be part of Reddit, that's not surprising.

What makes you say that?

I thought the story was that PG wanted his own subreddit where nobody could downvote, you said no, so he built HN (this is a paraphrasing of hazy memories)

edit: If memory serves, Steve mentioned this offhand in a video interview I saw somewhere. I think this one, but I could be wrong.

http://blog.hipmunk.com/mixergy-interview-with-steve-huffman...

That is correct.

me too funny enough i never went to reddit

Let's hope not.

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