reddit gold, one year later (spoiler: the naysayers were wrong)
reddit.com
reddit.com
It's a playful inside joke that makes people want to be in it, even if the actual features of a premium subscription are negligible. It's also common to have people give each others gold subscriptions in response to kind acts or as a reward for particularly insightful comments.
There are lessons to be learned for those implementing the freemium business model, for sure, although I completely disagree with people who claimed that this is an indication that advertising doesn't work. Selling products or services often beats advertising (revenue wise), but there is plenty of money to be made with ads. (I speak firsthand, as I've always done well with ads.)
(I believe, at least for a while, you could also change someone else's avatar for something like $20 or $30, and they could pay some similar amount to insure it against changes.)
Rather, you should draw conclusions about the strategic vision of the now-departed Conde Nast executives who were responsible for allocating such headcount.
Karma appears to have manifested outside of Reddit.
Anyway, not maligning the marketability of reddit. It's just that it makes clear that advertising revenue is a hard way to make money.
Respectfully, that's a very naive conclusion to draw.
You may as well try selling wooly hats and coats in the desert, and conclude that making money selling wooly hats and coats is really hard.
I wouldn't say that the goodwill Reddit and its community have engendered over the last few years are "nothing". This is just a reminder that intangible goods are just as marketable as tangible ones, and it's not just Apple that can pull it off.
Regarding your second point, you may have to personalize it in order to run a successful campaign on Reddit, but the returns can be good and manifold, especially for a startup.
See http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/03/my-duck-duck-go-... for a detailed report of a Reddit ad campaign.
http://impromptudo.tumblr.com/post/3984362470/my-impromptudo...
// So Playboy isn't a porn mag then?
If reddit is a pornography site, then so is google.
Reddit is a hardcore porn site, it's just it's not exclusively a hardcore porn site. Indeed in part it appears to skirt illegality without blushing. Advertisers do have problems with advertising on such sites I'm sure.
Presumably you and the parent would argue that if you advertised in Playboy next to a feature (I don't actually know the layout, I've just heard they have non-porn articles) then you wouldn't be advertising in a porn magazine?
Given the diversity of there subreddits, I don't think you can claim reddit "is" anything. Reddit is a hardcore pornography site if you want it to be.
Your comment has been upvoted to the top (I believe) because unfortunately that same culture of anti-advertising spills over to HN.
Remember. Google made $9bn last quarter, mostly from online advertising. A massive amount of that (about half?) went to 3rd party websites. There's money in this game...
All this post says is "Donations are successful for some value of 'success'".
If it was really all that successful, I don't think all the employees would have left.
I've never earned more than a pittance from any of the ads on my sites.
There's unfortunately a lot of people who believe all you need to do is slap ads on any website and watch the money come in. It actually takes time, effort, learning, and to some extent skill to know what will work and what won't work. You either need targeted users with intent, or you need more users.
Saying you can't make money from online advertising is like a non-programmer saying you can't write a tetris game. They're saying that because they haven't learnt to program yet and so it seems impossible to them.
> that doesn't necessarily meant that online advertising works, either.
The fact that Google paid out $4bn or whatever last quarter to 3rd party websites surely shows that online advertising works.
It's evident that it works for some markets and sites, but it just seems to be quite difficult compared to charging money for a product.
If you rule out advertising income because you don't like adverts, or because you don't have the skills necessary, then you're missing out on a slice of a gigantic pie. The vast majority of the general population are receptive to advertising and find it useful.
I think it's worth remembering that most people in the tech world are absolute outliers. In the real world, most people own and watch a TV. Most people buy newspapers. Most people view and click on adverts. Most people don't own ipads. etc etc
edit: You can downmod this all you like. You're the one missing out on the money.
That's terrible justification to do something I consider sleazy just to make a buck. I am a proponent of the idea of voting with my wallet, unfortunately for some reason that concept seems to get whitewashed by people who justify ignoring it by saying its "just business". That mindset is even stronger by people who are not end consumers.
>You're the one missing out on the money.
I used to be OK running enough ads for my web properties to cover hosting. Then I discovered I had scruples.
Advertising is not 'sleazy'. It works, and it provides a service to both advertiser, publisher, and consumer.
Do you also consider online dating to be sleazy, or job posting sites? Because that's essentially what advertising is - matching a consumer interested in something, to an advertiser who provides something.
Without advertising, most consumers would not have a clue what products and services exist. Most manufacturers would have no way to tell people about the service/product they provide.
I'm literally amazed at the naivety.
I agree that at its best advertising is matching, basically filling in an information gap. But it often does the opposite, exploiting an information gap / ignorance; in fact it's often explicitly and completely unapologetically aimed at doing that, looking to create and exploit information asymmetries. You make more money by selling people an expensive version of something they can get equivalent cheaper, or by luring people into a contract whose full cost they don't realize up front. There's a reason advertisers tend to read up on behaviorist psychology, because exploiting weaknesses in human decision-making, to encourage people to allocate their resources in a way that they wouldn't do with perfect information, is a big part of the game.
I may just know the wrong people, but I don't actually know anybody in marketing who doesn't have a sort of cynical "tricking suckers into buying our clients' stuff" view, at least some of the time. That's the game; you don't last long in the business if you have a purely idealistic view of only matching people to quality products that are a good match for them, especially since at larger firms you often have no choice about which products you're supposed to be selling.
The two are not mutually exclusive.
>it provides a service to both advertiser, publisher, and consumer
Given the number of advertizing channels, and the pool of products and services offered, the cost (in time) to the consumer, is rather high just to learn that X exists.
>Do you also consider online dating to be sleazy, or job posting sites? Because that's essentially what advertising is - matching a consumer interested in something, to an advertiser who provides something.
I'd agree that they are essentially the same if I had to go to "fast food" section of craigslist to find out what fast food joints out there, or the "auto insurance" section to find out that Progressive is a thing.
>I'm literally amazed at the naivety.
Say I accept your premise, that still doesn't negate the fact that there is enough advertizement in other mediums that all the virtues of it are already sufficiently met that adding advertizement to my websites don't create any value for the visitor.
I don't believe in the eradication of advertizement, just that it has reached a level of permeation that subjecting my visitors to even more of it is something I do not believe in.
Most people can tune out things they're not interested in.
Just as you walk down a street, you are bombarded with shop signage, and you filter out the ones that interest you, and the ones that don't. You read a magazine, and when faced with an advert that's not relevant or interesting, you turn the page.
There are certainly people who do not have the ability to cope well with adverts on the internet, and for them, adblock exists.
Vermont is a tourist trap and as such doesn't allow billboards. Should they allow them and just tell the leaf-peepers to enjoy the scenery around the billboards? Or is the presence of advertizement, willfully ignored or not, still intrusive?
We don't allow advertizement in schools (well, thats eroding, but anyway..), I'm willing to bet your workplace isn't covered in advertizement posters and have an intercom and/or tvs constantly blaring ads all day unless you work a particularity shitty, most likely retail, job. Why not? If you could just decide to tune out the ads once and never worry about it again, why not?
Advertizing is a necessary evil. You can just say that. You don't have to justify it as a practice you (or others) engage in beyond that. No, I don't think its _evil_ evil, I'm just using the phase, but what I don't understand is that you seem to be arguing for it beyond its role as a necessary evil. Why do you? Are you defending it as a practice you have diluted yourself into beveling is good for everyone so that you don't have to feel conflicted about engaging in it? Are you just talking the talk to make a practice you engage in (and yourself as a user) look better in the court of public opinion? Have you just swallowed the "if its profitable, it is therefore good in every metric" ideology hook, line and sinker? I really don't get where you're coming from.
Sounds like it would conflict with Vermont's branding. In other words, for Vermont beautiful foliage is a far better inducement to get people to come and spend money than a bunch of signs with words on them.
I work from home, and generally have the TV on all the time, showing me amongst other things, adverts. It doesn't bother me. In fact I find it very useful and interesting.
It's no more a necessary evil than "shops" are.
Shops are pretty much advertising. They connect a consumer to several manufacturers. They stock things you might want to buy. You go in, get bombarded with branding advertising products. You filter out the ones you want, and buy them. The shop gets a cut of revenue, just like a website gets a cut of any sale after a user clicks on an advert (Either directly, or averaged out to a per click/impression price).
Some people do hate shops as well. I've gone to the mall with people who find the whole experience absolutely horrible and uncomfortable. Personally, I love browsing round shops, seeing what you can find.
Shops are pretty much advertising by their very nature. A shop without a stock of goods for you to buy wouldn't be a very useful shop.
Ignoring that weird anology, you seem to be arguing that since you personally enjoy advertising, then everyone else in the world should just deal with advertising all the time, because, well, speckledjim on HN doesn't really mind it all that much.
It's just not a very convincing argument.
I'm basing it on data and numbers. If advertising didn't work, it wouldn't be a $multibillion industry.
If advertising is just about educating consumers, why don't advertisers run ads that are critical of their own products? A half-truth can be worse than an outright lie, because it is more confusing.
If people don't want to see the ads, well they can go find some other site to see: it's that simple. They get to use my site(s) for free, so I think it's a pretty good deal for them.
There's an arguable point from an anarchist, I suppose, viewpoint about the tyrrany of property laws and concentration of resources, but that's not I'd suggest what most graffiti artists are trying to bring to the forefront with their work.
While still large, 3rd-party payout was about 20% of Google's revenue ($1.75b total). Here is the breakdown, from their quarterly report (http://investor.google.com/earnings/2011/Q2_google_earnings....):
Total Google revenues: $9.03b
Revenues from Google properties: $6.23b
Revenues from the AdSense network: $2.48b
Google cut of AdSense revenues: $0.73b
Payouts to AdSense publishers: $1.75bOn other sites we typically see 1-3% with a decent conversion. I threw a lot of money at Reddit and was REALLY disappointed with the outcome.
I can't think of a community that is less anti-advertising. If I had a nickel for every time a Redditor has talked about purposely leaving ad-block off on that site...
>If it was really all that successful, I don't think all the employees would have left.
I believe their payroll is significantly higher than it has ever been. No way to know what individual salaries look like, but it's beyond argument that they have more employees now, and those employees are being paid well enough to stay.
I do agree though that this does not speak to online advertising in general. Reddit is a single site, -obviously not enough data points to make broad pronouncements about the health of online advertising (which, incidentally, is a market predicted to be around 34 billion in 2012 in the U.S. alone...).
It takes commitment, knowledge and a careful execution to see a site that gets over a billion page views every month, to monetize. For that, let's start with not pissing off the people who work on it, first.
If conde has already paid a large sum to acquire a property, how much more, percentage terms, would it really cost to add a few more servers, a few more developers, ad-ops? If you can't pay for gas, you should think about it, even before you buy a car.
I will point out a quote from the original reddit gold announcement: "Conde Nast allocates resources proportional to revenue."
I don't use reddit anymore because I found it to be an unproductive use of my time, but that doesn't mean it's bad. Youtube, for all of the stupidity of its comments, has nonetheless grown a fairly tight community of people who interact with each other through videos. Wikipedia, for all its politicking and acrimony, has a very tight community of core contributors. Reddit's community isn't the same as it used to be, true. It's much larger and much broader in appeal. Sure, that means I'm not as enamoured of it as I once was, but it's hardly a death knell. In every measurable way, reddit is doing better than it ever has.
http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/17913/reddit_now...
I think this is just a necessary byproduct of our need to find patterns in events and relate current experiences to past ones. Rather than saying, "the dynamic on this site is changing from something familiar to something new", we always feel the need to compare it to some past experience. Thus, techies are always looking for "the next microsoft", calling g+ "the next facebook", looking for the next Netscape Moment, and so on. It seems to be a very deeply-ingrained need for us to cast entities and experiences as being reminiscent of those we've had before. I'm sure this is an instinct that is usually very beneficial, but boy howdy does it ever cause an inordinate amount of kvetching on the tubes.
I particularly like the subreddits that aim for better signal/noise ratio from the get-go and the good folks that help police them. One particularly outstanding fellow is blackstar9000, mod, creator, and prolific poster/commenter of several nice niche subreddits who has helped keep things in line. If there's any one who deserves some kudos in that regard, I'd nominate him/her for the honor.
I think that's what the issue is here. For people who have been part of a community for a long time it is painful to see this migration away from the core values you once thought the community stood for. In my opinion, "the desires of the masses changed" is just another way of saying that the community got hijacked by a wave of new users who didn't value what the entrenched users valued. This is, I think at least in a way, similar to a show jumping the shark.
The question of how to address this issue while maintaining free speech is a more complex one. The reddit founders, however, have shown no interest in finding ways to improve site quality from this perspective, and indeed, appear to support the bigotry.
Anyway, I bear a huge grudge against the site because they banned my account for sockpuppeting and harassment, so take all of the above with a grain of salt.
The site doesn't promote hate speech, it allows free speech. Also I think you're overstating things.
The question of how to address this issue while maintaining free speech is a more complex one.
Free speech and censorship are mutually exclusive. Reddit already has mechanisms to allow community censorship (report posts, post deletion by moderators, banning, invite-only subreddits, etc.), but paid reddit employees only step in when things get out of hand.
Also the community is very fickle. Any perceived censorship by reddit employees that seems suspect and they get out the pitchforks. This has happened a few times (e.g. the Sears incident).
I do think the front page could be better filtered, though. Right now the default reddit front page is pretty... weird.
At this point, I'm not sure what can be done, since now bigots form a substantial portion of the reddit community.
For example, there was this guy named Lou Franklin who was probably the biggest bigot in the history of the site, and they took YEARS to finally ban his account.
That said, if you're a Christian on a site full of free-thinking and free speech such as reddit, you're going to have to be thick-skinned. Most, if not all, mainstream religions have never been kind to free-thinkers of their time, so you have to understand any resentment we may or may not have towards theists.
If you expect a Christian on a site full of atheists to have to be thick-skinned, then by the same logic, you should expect an atheist in a high school full of Christians to be thick skinned. I don't think either of those conclusions is acceptable.
Are you thinking of the same reddit? It's a web site of funny videos, pictures of cats, rage comics, memes, and stupid jokes, and the occasional groupthink. 18 of the 25 front page links are imgur. Of the remaining 7, four are dumb discussions on reddit. One is a news article about the reddit founder (random crime story; otherwise uninteresting). One is a news link on youtube of actual news (if somewhat biased), and one is a link to an interesting study. Depending on how you count, that's 4-8% useful content. When you get into comments, it's even dumber.
reddit had a community of inquisitive, intellectual, creative individuals when it was formed at Harvard. Over time, the idiots and the bigots moved in, and right now it's a web site for wasting time on stupid amusements.
I was listening to right wing talk radio on a long car drive a few months back. What struct me was that the host, who mostly spewed venomous lies, would constantly refer to his viewers by some term (I forget the exact wording) like "the best and the brightest." I feel like reddit users are the left-wing equivalent of that. Clueless groupthink, combined with a very high opinion of themselves.
As an atheist, you're also free to move to a different country if Christianity bother you. US is 76.8% Christian. China is officially atheist. The only reason you're interested in this country is because it was founded on the Puritan work ethic, and has a very high level of social capital coming from Judeochristian values. But you shouldn't stay here and bitch about it. Same thing with blacks trying to go to the (better) white schools in the South prior to Brown vs. Board of Education -- they had their own place where they'd be accepted. Have fun with that logic.
Bigotry doesn't belong anywhere, even if people are free to leave. Intolerance hurts atheists more than it does Christians, and you're an idiot for endorsing it.
The stuff that gets to the frontpage is there because it's the most commonly appealing thing in the largest original subreddit communities (r/pics, etc). The intelligent discussions happen behind the scenes, on the small to medium sized subreddits. Anyone that's been on reddit for more than a week understands this.
By that token, there are, without a doubt, plenty of smart people on reddit. They are, as your comment implies, a tiny minority, confined to a few subreddits (and those are mostly characterized by groupthink -- e.g. any conservative comment on most liberal subreddits will get voted down, no matter how intelligent and well thought out). The front page is defined by what most people vote for, and that's rage comics, misogyny, with the occasional sprinkling of anti-Christian bigotry (this used to be more prominent, but the average IQ has dropped to the point where r/atheism is beginning to look smart). That's representative of the average reddit user.
All that said, I'm not looking for anything on the front page beyond a way to waste a bit of time. When I first joined reddit, I looked to it for intelligent articles. Later, I looked to it for amusement. Now, I look to it less and less, since memes aren't the same thing as wit.
cypherpunks is a generic account shared by many people on many websites. The username and password is cypherpunks/cypherpunks where allowed, and cypherpunks/cypherpunks1 where the username and password must be different. E-mail is usually cypherpunks@mailinator.com. It allows you to use websites while maintaining a semblance of anonymity.
This is now broken on HN. redditors rise to new heights in their debating ability.
I'm not going to repost all comments from the discussion, but the original comment was along the lines of:
I read reddit, but I would never buy a gold account. The site has too much hate speech, and it is hard to support that financially. Between the misogyny and the atheist anti-Christian bigotry, it's pretty bad. You don't have to be either a woman or a theist to see that's wrong.
The question of how to address this issue while maintaining free speech is a more complex one. The reddit founders, however, have shown no interest in finding ways to improve site quality from this perspective, and indeed, appear to support the bigotry.
QR code readers are a software (not hardware) install, and they install onto your phone (not PC), which is quite naturally close at hand when your reading off paper.
I'm not saying QR codes will proceed to establish themselves long-term. I am saying that if they don't, that will tell us more about the potential ecosystem for this sort of thing than CueCat's failure did, simply because major usability frictions inherent to the earlier technology are now out of the equation.