Reddit (YC S05): 1 billion monthly pageviews | Hacker News Reader

Reddit (YC S05): 1 billion monthly pageviews

reddit.com

145 pointstewks71 comments

Wow, good job, Team Reddit!

Since I think you guy still read HN: Something you all seem to do very, very well is interact with your users. Almost every day I'll see somebody [usually jedberg] show up in a thread answering a question, or responding to something, or even just saying hello.

Like this: http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/fdyyf/reddit_billions_...

That's awesome :).

Awesome? Would you still feel that way if your employees spent all day on reddit?!

I imagine so, if they were productive enough to reach 1 billion page views per month while doing so. What makes you think that their community involvement isn't the reason reddit has thrived while competitors have failed?

I'm just kidding!

Difference between HN and reddit, beautifully illustrated.

What better way to foster a community than interact with it, eh? :)

What else do you think non-technical founders should be obsessing over in those early months of a website? ;) But in all seriousness, that's a culture Steve and I had no choice but to bake into the site from day 0 because we had nothing without an active (and awesome) community. I'm thrilled to see that even a year after they trimmed the fat and we left, it still persists.

Make no mistake, reddit has 1B pageviews a month because of the community -- those of us who wear admin badges are basically just janitors who keep the place running, so to speak.

120,000,000 is what we (minecraft forum and minecraft wiki) hit for January (as per quantcast) which I think is pretty neat too, for anyone who likes pretty stats.

http://i.imgur.com/jgXrf.png If you like pretty stats, here are ours ;) Congrats to the Reddit folks, one of my favorite website on the internet nowadays!

Those would be the stats for what???

Yea, I don't think there are 50 sites out there that could boast those numbers.

Smokinn got it right. Stats that doesn't appear, we stream 1.2Billions videos/month (doesn't count embedded content).

Can you reveal any $ numbers; e.g. CPM, conversions to paid accounts, anything?

I am not affiliate with Manwin but found the article that was submitted here recently insightful. It partly deals with their operations:

The Geek-Kings of Smut http://nymag.com/print/?/news/features/70985/

What sort of infrastructure/hw/server software to you use for streaming?

His profile says he works for Manwin Canada... So it's very likely pornhub.com

(Manwin Canada also owns the Brazzers network of sites)

They're beautiful, those numbers! Does that come from a single site, or something that embeds across multiple, also how do you power that amount of traffic?

One single website.

17 Webservers (Apache+PHP) 4 Cache servers (Memcache+Redis) 2 Databases Clusters (MySQL+Sphinx): 1 Master + 3 slaves, 1master + 7 slaves.

Very nice! That's a very small setup for so many pageviews. Quite impressive. Shoot me an email sometime, I'd love to talk shop. jedberg@reddit.com

30,000,000 - the number of times the Cornify button has been clicked.

Congratulations! That's a very impressive achievement. Certainly a much faster growth rate than reddit!

That's 380 pages every second consecutively. The reality is probably much grimmer, say, 1000+ page a second during peak usage.

Very, very impressive.

Yeah, usually up to about 1200-1300 per second, but that's just from our app servers. Our caches can get up to 2500+ per second at peak.

For a co. that is handled by just a few developers, this is just phenomenal. Hats off to the team! :)

Reddit is an amazing site and an amazing community - there are a lot more factors that go into its success.

However, I think quality has suffered slightly recently based on the amount of content that is FFUU comics and just plain pics.

While I have been a user for 4+ years, and I love the site to death - there are some improvements in the UX tat could be made -- the most specific would be to allow further tags of images/image types. Since a fair chunk of the % of content is now images, I would be love to be able to unsub from specific image types.

E.g. FFUU/rage based comics, regardless of their content/message, I just personally dont prefer them. Cute pics, etc...

Reddit is king of my online content experience, but I am starting to need further granular control that is better that just /r/subreddits.

It's funny, because the reasoning (from what I understand) for subreddits instead of tags was that subreddits create distinct communities. While this is true, cases like FUU comics being in every subreddit point to subreddits as failing to contain their communties. With an additive tag system (Show me posts tagged "Minecraft") or the current system, those posts show up anyway. With a subtractive tag system (For the love of god, no more "FUUU"), they wouldn't show up.

Either way, I agree with you on FUU comics. They became so pervasive I just gave up and deleted my account.

Fun fact: I created the F7U12 subreddit. I'm sorry, but it's a fantastic way to unwind and a great community due to the fact that most comics are common annoyances everyday people have.

Besides, you can always unsubscribe.

More power to that /r/!

However - I am not a subscriber - and the FUU comic as a visual style has become a way of communicating in many other subreddits.

I just want the style/genre of a pic to be taggable so I can opt-out.

Regardless of the content of a FUUU / rage style comic, they never seem to be seen as appropriate view-at-work material.

Oh, I agree with that. I hadn't realised there were comics posted in other subreddits that much, maybe I didn't notice because I am subscribed to FU...

Well it was about common annoyances. Now it's mostly about the annoyances in social interactions.

What does that translate to in ad revenues?

About $3.50.

Wow, this comment would've been downvoted to oblivion in the old days. What does this mean?

I took it as satire on the whole 'Reddit got bought by a giant megaconglomerate yet still had to beg their userbase for money to keep going, and their site is still slow as a dog' fiasco.

Then again, about two days ago the Inbox stopped taking 2+ minutes to load, so...

Same. The subtext says more than the words do.

No, because people would get it's a South Park reference.

I'd hate to thinking that our dialog has downgraded to memes and TV show references. Regardless of appropriateness, it doesn't add information or opinion, it's just noise.

How's being an elitist prick working out for you at parties?

This is clearly simplified, but nevertheless...

  [deleted]

[edit] Info from comments demonstrates these results, though simplified, to be incredibly optimistic. Assuming a CPM of $1.00 and taking into account the ratio of paid advertisement to Reddit advertisement, the Monthly Revenue number would dip significantly to $100,000.

It seems that CPMs are more in the $0.50-1.00 range[1]. Which still translates into a very nice chunk of change and that's not counting other initiatives such as reddit gold.

[1] http://www.winningtheweb.com/reddit-homepage-advertising-res...

I have no idea but judging from the amount of real ads I see on Reddit, I'd guess they make way more money from Gold than from display ads at the moment.

Keep in mind 90% of the ads right now are just games or reddit ads (keep refreshing the page). Not mention a good percentage of their users use adblock and are extemely anti-commercial. I think they are making significantly, significantly less.

No site like Reddit can fill 1 billion impressions at $2 eCPM. Closer to $0.25 I'd bet.

I've run the "sponsored link" ads before, and it's usually $0.40-0.70 CPM.

That's insanely optimistic to the point of absurdity.

Don't forget Reddit Gold. They were at 40k/month when they started, probably up to 60k/month now.

This proves that it doesn't have to have a negative effect on the page count to open source the code. Reddit source code: http://code.reddit.com/

It's probably been beneficial to them, given the number of people who've identified vulnerabilities in the code then responsibly disclosed them. Reddit's never had a serious security breach, which is doubt due in large part to no sensitive information being linked to accounts, but also because they've had quite a few people point out potential problems to them.

There's a lot to be said for free code review.

Would it have benefited against spammers to release the full source code so gaming the system would be more difficult?

In light of the threads lately about how well StackOverflow does with their MS stack, I'm wondering how their traffic compares to Reddit, which runs on OSS/Python + Java.

According to the Quora below they're running on 112 Amazon EC2 instances.

http://www.quora.com/How-many-servers-does-Reddit-have

You can't compare them directly, as SO has fewer posts per day (I assume) and the comment trees of reddit are larger and more intensive to display.

+ Cassandra :)

Cassandra was most of why I included "+Java" ;)

As a non-employee I can't post specifics, but it's a lot less traffic.

Well, this answers my question: http://blog.serverfault.com/post/stack-exchanges-architectur...

About 1/10th Reddit's traffic, but also, I would think, a much lighter usage pattern (i.e. a lot more writes on Reddit, more quickly changing pages, etc.)

I have mixed feelings about this statistic. On the one hand, I get to feel cool because I was into reddit before it got popular. On the other hand, reddit has jumped the shark with all of the awful people that have recently joined to get it to the 1 billion monthly pageview category. But, then again, that's kind of a good thing because I don't visit reddit anymore so I'm a million times more productive than I used to be :)

Having more people is a blessing and a curse. Same with having a tight nit group of people.

With more people, the pro is that there is more activity. With this, you have an effective mechanical turk of some sort since there are so many people to get help from and one of those people can be very useful. The con is that conversations are overloaded, so many try to post one liners to achieve top listing status in a thread. This discourages those with better experience and insight to make a comment since they have to spend a long time on a comment only to have it buried and ignored. The other con is that only pop submissions or submissions that take the least amount of time to consume (r/pics) have the most upmods. Take Hacker News. I remember when it was like reading a programmer's mailing list. Now with so many people, the most we can relate to are tech gossip.

With less people conversations are more focused and detailed. The con is you have to be lucky to have experienced individuals to provide better insight.

Still, don't quote me on this stuff. This is something a social scientist can explain better.

Nonetheless, complaining about the degradation of an online community isn't really something to get worked up about (and this is from a guy with a signed reddit bobble-head and a first issue reddit sticker). Entropy is a fact of nature. It's like a group of friends who had such a fun time together for a certain era then end up hating each other. Or like Forrest Gump who reminded me as a child that how your life is setup now isn't how it will always be. I cried when I saw that movie as a child for I knew my care-free childhood life was gonna be over anytime now and...shit, I just realized that happend.

> Take Hacker News. I remember when it was like reading a programmer's mailing list.

Well, there's http://news.usethesource.com/news :)

Did you adjust your subscriptions? If you adjust them, you'll find all the old content you knew and loved.

Just don't read the front page.

I certainly don't (well, not often, still need to keep up on the goings on).

If you can't monetize a billion pageviews in ways other than Reddit Gold, you've got to be kidding me.

reddit has a self-serve advertising system that's been in place longer than reddit gold.

Do you have any suggestions?

If the reddit team had had (errr... how's my use of English past tense?) the $150K deal, they might have lasted this long on just that. They probably would not have sold to Conde Nast when they did.

Grammatically it's just fine, although I might have used "had received" or something instead to make quick reading a little easier.

"Had" or "had had" are both correct, even though the latter sounds a bit silly.

Welcome to English. We're sorry.

Congratulations!

Also, YC S05, we are in 2011. Work hard, play for the long run, listen to your customers. Go through the lows and the highs, never stop, for nearly 6 years. This what I take from this story :)

Huge congratulations to the reddit team, old and new.

Does this mean you'll be doing your next round of hiring for a new dev soon?

They've hired one guy (spladug), and I believe they're further along in the process on another. They announced a few months ago that they were hiring. [1] Raldi or Jedberg would be the best people to ask. I'm sure one of them will drop by this thread.

[1]http://blog.reddit.com/2010/11/thank-you-mr-nast-may-we-have...

Yes, we'll be doing some more hiring very soon. Keep your eye on the blog.

this is really impressive, especially considering that they have just a couple of engineers

Reply on news.ycombinator.com