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Comment by cryptoz | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't sound like CN has really changed their attitude much. The news in this blog post is fantastic! But it sounds like the money is coming from Gold subscribers, not CN. Reddit is either already bigger than Wired - or probably will be soon...they have > 1 billion pageviews / month. It's totally crazy that they run the site with about 5 people.

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).

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pageviews aren't what matter anymore, UV/month is.

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.

> reddit rose 11% from 1.0 to 1.1 million

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:

http://www.reddit.com/tb/fdyyf

comscore's numbers are notoriously lower than quantcast/google-analytics, but usually about half not 1/14th... so somethings clearly wrong there too.

I do not trust comscore's numbers at all. They rely on opt-in sampling of user data. There is obvious selection bias there. Large companies will never allow such tracking software, so anybody browsing from work will never be counted. There are many other large demographics that they just plain miss. They have a history of goofing badly, for example being directionally wrong about Google's ad revenue [1].

1. http://seekingalpha.com/article/72911-why-was-everyone-wrong...

To me it seems obvious that Reddit's core userbase would not be willing to install the spyware that comScore piggybacks onto to acquire its data. It doesn't surprise me in the least that Reddit is consequently under-represented in comScore's numbers.

Comscore numbers vary wildly for sites that don't reconcile their numbers w/ comscore's. And only sites that publish rate cards for displa ads really do that.

I remember once when comscore reported that delicious had dropped to 44k uniques when we had millions of actives, much less uniques.

I think it depends on the kind of web-site you are running more than anything as to which metrics are important. Just like in finance, depending on the business model, different metrics are tracked (e.g. free cash flow, revenue, etc.). Plus, hardly ever is a single metric important. Sites will look at page views for new/existing visitors, bounce rates for new visitors, time on site, etc. depending on their goals.

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.

There are definitely more stats sites care about, but question number one from CPM ad buyers is universally "what are your uniques?" They care about the specific demographics of those uniques too, but when they're doing branding (vs conversion based advertising) they really care mostly about how many distinct sets of eyeballs they can address.

How do UVs matter more now, for advertisers?

I would say showing your ad to more unique people vs the same person over and over again would be where the new value of Uniques comes into play; of course YMMV.

Don't they ensure unique views with cookies anyways?

The only difference to the advertiser should be how fast they deplete the bought view/click-contingent for a given month.

> The news in this blog post is fantastic! But it sounds like the money is coming from Gold subscribers, not CN.

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.

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