Reddit Sees Massive Growth & Hires New Programmers | Hacker News Reader

Reddit Sees Massive Growth & Hires New Programmers

blog.reddit.com

104 pointsstaunch32 comments

Not surprising, Reddit was in the perfect position at the perfect time to suck up all of Digg's traffic when they briefly faltered.

On top of that they've curated not just a large community (and even more impressive -- self-sustaining sub-communities) but a culture that is just as sticky as the content. They are properly entrenched now.

"our average time on site has remained steady at an impressive 15 and a half minutes"

Wow. I find this number pretty staggering, but I'm not familiar with traffic patterns on discussion & news sites. Can anyone who is weigh in with how this compares to other news or discussion sites?

On reddit that stat is inflated by each click taking so long to load. When I use reddit, I literally spend 30-40% of my time waiting for pages to load.

On the contrary, when I worked at reddit, we found that people allocate a certain amount of time to using the site (consciously or subconsciously) and the speed of the site doesn't seem to have much effect on that (unless it's completely unresponsive).

In other words, if they can read 100 threads in 15 minutes because things are running really smoothly, they will. If they can only read 50 threads in 15 minutes because things are under heavy load, then we would just get 50 pageviews from them.

TLDR: Slow reddit -> fewer pageviews, same time on site

It's impressive when compared to, say, a news or review website. But it's not that impressive for a discussion forum.

I run several discussion forums, and average time on site ranges from 9 minutes (the one with least loyalty) through to fractionally over 17 minutes (the one with pretty good loyalty).

I'd be far more interested in knowing reddit's bounce rate and spread of recency and loyalty. Those are the killer metrics... just how obsessed are your users?

I'm pretty proud of one of my sites having a bounce rate of only 18%. Now that is a fairly unheard of number for a decent sized site.

Another site I run has over 26% of users having visited 201+ times. Loyalty off the scale.

What I've found is that it's fairly easy to build in a high frequency of existing users returning soon and of extending the time on the site, but it's much harder to build actual visitor numbers.

Basically communities have natural size limits before they crumble a bit, and reddit's magic sauce is subreddits and the ability to carry on pretending reddit is small when it's really large.

Our % of users who return 201+ times per month is over 30%

Here's some other Loyalty numbers for reddit (March - May 2011):

- Over 38% of our audience spend more that 10min per visit to reddit, Over 17% spends more than 30minutes per visit - Over 88% of audience visits reddit multiple times a day - Over 20% of our audience visit more than 20 pages per visit - New visitors to reddit account for 16.65% of our traffic & spend and average of 7:58 time on site - Returning visitors to reddit account for 83.35% of our traffic and spend an average of 17:31 time on site - Bounce rate is ~ 26%

For the size of reddit, that bounce rate is awesome. As are your loyalty numbers.

It's well known that forums are sticky, but your loyalty numbers confirm you're a gem.

It does remind of a discussion forum, and one of the problems with forums is display advertisers don't like paying to be on them. Perhaps it is high profile enough to escape this stigma? Such as attracting sponsorship deals for different categories.

The Reddit community has really become something incredible. They really have to be careful and not upset their community through selfish monetize strategies like Digg. They've done great so far. I vote that they monetize by Gold memberships, donations, merchandise, and that tiny ad box on the right (which should start having actual advertisements - simple ones, no flash intrusions).

Strangely, this growth happens in the exact same time I ponder leaving reddit because of its degradation.

I observed that also. I wonder if it's a flat cyclical fluctuation that popular public social news sites go through, or if it's a sloped cyclical movement (usually downward).

I believe it's just a function of how long you've been a member of the site - it's easy to fantasize about the "way things used to be", much harder to objectively rank the quality of a site and also keep track of that in your mind over time.

Check these:

http://www.reddit.com/r/truereddit

http://www.reddit.com/r/indepthstories

http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience

http://www.reddit.com/r/earthporn

reddit.com/r/frugal has also been good for me.

/r/frugal can get a little crazy at times, but yes, I subscribe as well :)

also: http://reddit.com/r/bicycling

http://reddit.com/r/linguistics

http://reddit.com/r/beer

http://reddit.com/r/homebrewing

reddit is a fantastic site for communities. The defaults are way too crowded, but the smaller subs are awesome.

I've seen plenty of folks threaten to do the same with HN, since it isn't exclusive enough for them anymore, either. Both sites will do fine, I think.

When I joined reddit some 3 years ago, I was a Digg user that wanted fresher content. Eventually reddit's minimalist style converted me, since all the Digg content was showing up on reddit.

Coincidentally, I'm seeing myself frequenting HN more often to read actual content, instead of sifting through tons of memes and pictures. HN is also starting to display content faster, which doesn't really mean anything unless you like shouting 'First' in comment pages (even more so now that I'm working, so by the time I visit both sites, the stories are posted).

The community of reddit is nice, doubly appealing when you are having fellow celebrities among your members; however, with the influx of people, it becomes difficult to feel like you are actually contributing.

Honestly every community comes with its foibles. (Metafilter: kind of ridiculously liberal at times, overly anti-business, HN: not very good with racism/sexism (IMO), Reddit: kind of immature, dangerous libertarian streak) These are all awesome communities though (with reddit, the unit of community is the subreddit, rather than the whole site, and you do have to pick the right subreddits.)

This isn't just a problem with online communities either. True communities are a mess.

What is Conde Nast's plan for monetizing Reddit? How much operating profit would it take to recover the investment that bought Reddit?

I'm not sure what Conde's plan is, but I really would love to see reddit run [1]viglinks on the site. If you're not familiar with it, viglinks uses some javascript to append an affiliate ID to any outbound links on the site (and it's completely transparent to the user).

I see people linking me to amazon all the time when I ask for book recommendations. Often, I end up buying things as a result of things I see on reddit.

(I don't work for viglinks, but I think the idea behind it is brilliant. As a user, this is the most non-intrusive way to monetize a site I've yet seen.)

[1]http://www.viglink.com/

This would be interesting - although I wonder if there would be any negative reaction from redditors. Posterous tried this out last year[1].

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1309403

I think that the problem there was posterous didn't communicate this to their users.

Reddit does a fantastic job of communicating with the users; if they explained what was happening, I think the users would be fine with it.

I agree, I especially think that Redditors would be happy to support Reddit in a way that leaves them with the same amount of money, Amazon with less and Reddit with more.

If they announce it and add a setting to disable it, I doubt their users would complain. Seems like a really good idea

Livejournal did this in 2010 and their regexes were pretty bad redirecting GlutenFreeBay.com to ebay.com thinking they were changing affiliate parameters. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1168331

Viglink take 25% of the revenue.

For the size of reddit and the potential of the revenue stream, they would do much better signing up to the top X (where X is in the hundreds) affiliate schemes themselves and doing their own re-writing server-side (no lag introduced on the client side).

As a secondary revenue stream, reddit could then make an API available for others to do the same and charge only 15% for the service... undercutting viglink and making more revenue for themselves from other sites.

URL rewriting is easy, and signing up to affiliate schemes takes 30 seconds and is only done once per scheme... there's no reason to give away 25% of revenue for it.

If I recall right, reddit is profitable from reddit gold, sponsored links and sidebar ads. It's problem is that Conde Nast is extremely slow to spend that back on reddit.

Digression: Hypothetically, how could HN be monetized?

Leverage the tech savvy user base and start a start up incubator. Take a small part of each company's equity.

HN is already being [indirectly] monetized If even 1% of the ycombinator's growth is due to HN.

Numbers look great. Time on site is an average of 15 and a half minutes, which is pretty impressive user engagement. Looks like Conde Naste is committing some additional investment into Reddit. It will interesting to see how they try to generate revenue.

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