Condé Nast finally throws Reddit a bone, new hires coming
blog.reddit.com
blog.reddit.com
I've been there for almost five years, and I have to say I've loved every minute of it. Back then it was smaller and nerdier, and now it's all big and popular but you can still find the same cozy space in the smaller communities (/r/coding, /r/compsci, for example).
comscore's january numbers just came out this morning. Wired droped 38% from 9.4 to 5.9 million. In one month. Hopefully for their sake thats a javascript screw up.
reddit rose 11% from 1.0 to 1.1 million. Again, in one month.
so if you were to over-extrapolate here you could say that reddit will overtake wired maybe late this year, but as it stands now wired is >6x bigger a media property.
What this tells you, though, is that if they are only seeing 1.1 million unique visitors a month that those visitors account for 1,000 page views a month which is a lot. And that's the average! I bet a lot of sites would love to have that number.
The only difference to the advertiser should be how fast they deplete the bought view/click-contingent for a given month.
The numbers that they show (the same place the one-billion pageviews stat comes from) indicate that they're now closer to 14 million monthly uniques:
1. http://seekingalpha.com/article/72911-why-was-everyone-wrong...
I remember once when comscore reported that delicious had dropped to 44k uniques when we had millions of actives, much less uniques.
I doubt gold money is sufficient to hire 4 persons. But revenue has one important property, which the admins explained last time around, and the one before: when they have revenue and growth to show, they can make inroad with CN. The last pair of hires were not self-funded, they were based on Reddit finally demonstrating a way to make money.
I expect the same thing for this round.
This sort of action would be a good way for CN to rope back in any doubters that their $$ will benefit the site.
edit: I know they indeed beefed up investments in hardware and I was referring to hiring more devs.
Maybe the ultimate Reddit community project would be to raise a large amount of capital to buy the site from CN.
I've wondered the same thing before. Is there any precedent for such a thing?
Here's a dumb way to do it: find enough funding and convince, oh, half of reddit to join the new venture. It is, after all, mostly open source. Heh.
It did for the founders!
Also, this: http://www.itworld.com/offbeat/134411/animated-take-cheezbur...
almost...
Kudos.
30 employees and 20 billion pageviews/month. Not clear how many of those people are engineers.
http://www.craigslist.org/about/factsheet
pg makes reference to it in this essay http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html
Yes, 1 billion page views is a relatively serious load, technically. But there's not much difference between a small team building the software to handle it and a huge enterprise department doing the same.
In fact, the small team will often produce better results. When given enough motivation, money and coffee.
I can't speak for the taste and discernment of the people who visited that site 500M times, though.
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/digg.com+reddit.com/
A sudden influx of 100k people overnight is not easy to manage.
The number on the visits graph is even more substantial.