Reddit becomes reddit Inc.
blog.reddit.com
blog.reddit.com
"Reach" (impressions/eyeballs) are only important insofar as you're talking to someone who might buy what you're selling (see "relevancy"). The sub-reddit system could theoretically segment the audience in interesting ways, but other than r/gaming, there aren't many natural industry fits amongst popular sub-reddits.
Anecdotally, the audience would also seem to be advertisement-averse. An advertiser should be willing to pay network prices for the audience (i.e. pennies CPM), which makes it a nice living for a small group of folks living off their passion, but pretty useless to a Condé Nast trying to run a media empire.
I think the business model in a reddit-like site could be selling curated content in other media, e.g. a meme-series of coffee table books. Think Harry Potter, not Oprah.
If you're in the content game, your business's value is in having the attention of a group of people. Your first attempt to monetize that asset needn't be to sell your audience's attention to someone else, in this case undermining your ability to keep their attention. Instead, you should focus on bringing things your audience wants - and would pay for - to them. Sometimes that means you need to make the things they want to buy instead of shilling them for someone else, because no one sells what your people want.
Condé Nast isn't built to do this.
A co-founder.
There are great little ideas that are not being managed effectively in my opinion. For instance, it costs more to target a particular subreddit than the whole website, which is not particularly good for the kinds of small businesses that could really benefit from the service (there's also a daily minimum -- $20/day for site-wide, and $30/day for subreddit buys -- compared to Google, and Facebook's $1/day minimum).
Secondly, the true genius of the Reddit ad system is that your ad looks a lot like a regular submission. Think about the power of Adwords -- your ad looks just like the content your potential buyers came to consume anyway.
Thirdly, and here is the double-edged sword -- in the comments, a conversation (actually, a long-term, multiparty conversation) can build around your company. The power of this is truly great; however the implementation has been spotty. Every post on Reddit is submitted via a community with rules, and moderators. The one exception to this is self serve ads. What you end up with is a lot of spam and trolling in your self-serve ad, which defeats the whole purpose of having the comments in the first place.
Unfortunately, in my experience, the admins aren't sure what to say and fallback on free speech adherence, etc. although many posts and comments are taken down in various subreddits due to a lack of observance on the part of the commentor or OP to that sub's rules.
TL;DR: Reddit's self-serve ad system is a billion dollar idea in the making, but only if the culture of the community and more importantly the admins allow it to be so.
And there's nothing stopping someone other than Reddit from monetizing all that content the same way. If I wanted to, I could send private messages to hundreds of Redditors and get permission to include their comments in a self-help book gleaned from AskReddit comments, and Reddit would have absolutely no advantage over me in doing this, nor any way to stop me. As far as any content on Reddit goes, the story is the same way. Just as Hacker Weekly operates independent of YC and the people who run HN.
I think if you want to monetize Reddit, monetizing the audience isn't the only way. There's no reason Reddit can't, aside from having subreddits, sell paid hosting for completely separate, possibly private reddits that don't connect to Reddit itself.
>...you agree that by posting messages...you grant us a royalty-free, perpetual, non-exclusive, unrestricted, worldwide license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, enhance, transmit, distribute, publicly perform, display, or sublicense any such communication in any medium (now in existence or hereinafter developed) and for any purpose, including commercial purposes, and to authorize others to do so.
In fact, reddit has already used user content to create products. They've done shirts (http://store.xkcd.com/reddit/#Jawsbackwardstshirt) and posters (http://store.xkcd.com/reddit/#Cuiltheoryposter) based off of comments or submissions.
They also have things like /r/dragonage taht was setup by EA (possibly with a fee?) to promote the game
As a small business advertiser on Reddit, I feel as if this would be a good idea, especially for big businesses; however as I wrote before (http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=shoham), there are a couple of little things that I think you guys could be doing to be more business friendly with self serve ads for small businesses like my own: http://www.feed-forward.net
The three main ideas are: (1) lower the cost per day for ads (for a small business, with less than 100K a year in revenue, Reddit ads don't scale well). Facebook, and Google have a $1/day minimum. (2) Let the OPss of self serve ads moderate their post. It defeats the purpose of spending money on an ad, and having such an awesome idea such as the SSA program if the comments section is hounded by trolls, and moderated by no one. I've been told by admins that Reddit has a long history of free speech adherence, which is great, but posts are removed from subreddits all the time for not complying with the subreddits' rules, at the mods discretion. My proposition is that you guys extend this courtesy to buyers of SSAs.
Third, allow advertisers who have been advertising for a while to focus their impressions on people who have already clicked on their ads. Again, this is a small business-friendly idea -- I've focused most of my ad buys on r/music , a huge subreddit of 150K people. If after a month or two I could focus my buys on those users I've already engaged with in that r/, that would help bolster two objectives: keep the ad conversational, and help advertisers create a community around their submission/business. Once a few thousand people have seen my ad every day for two or three months, I can maybe even invite them to a sponsored r/...
-Shoham
If you, or someone else at Reddit, would like to discuss more, my contact info is in my profile. Cheers.
Of course the joke here is that J&J bought Babycenter. If I were a category-specific CPG company, I'd cut out the publisher middleman, too.
Ad networks & exchanges lead us to think there's a perfectly efficient & liquid market for ad space, but there's a real scaling problem for big advertisers that leads them to stick with big publishers. Quality control on r/parenting would be a concern.
This is false. My girlfriend works in social media at a Fortune 100 company. Just a few of their many products are geared toward babies and other things of interest to parents. She attends "mommy blogger" conferences, reaches out to people on Twitter and Facebook, and otherwise works with people who have a substantial audience in order to advertise with them.
Big companies are much more likely than small companies to even have such a role. They are very interested in promoting themselves and increasing their profits in any way possible. There's absolutely no reason they wouldn't be interested in something like r/parenting
By bother he meant spend a bunch of cash, not @reply to people on Twitter. They can hire your girlfriend to submit stuff and comment on reddit all day, but that doesn't give reddit any revenue.
My girlfriend doesn't work the spammer role that you seem to be envisioning. Her job is to discover an audience that is actually interested in the products her company offers and to reach out to them. Part of that job is to manage the Facebook presence for products that have well over 100,000 followers. Another part, as I said, is to find relevant blogs and other websites frequented by visitors of an appropriate demographic as a platform for their ad campaigns.
I brought real information to this thread. There was no reason whatsoever for you to shit on that.
The NSFW ones are tricky. On one hand there's a lot of money in porn. But most of the content there is either stuff from porn companies (that would be paying for ads), or amateur stuff, and would an amateur audience like porn company ads?
Now, if they had a /r/PharmaExecutives...
There's an opportunity to monetize Reddit users, even if they seem somewhat far from the core product.
I don't think it's a function of them being bad or lazy, but being such a small team for such an enormous site. I can't imagine being the sole community manager for such a monster. You have to triage between "will answer tersely" and "will ignore". And unless it's a lawsuit or a fire about to burn down the server room, almost everybody seems to end up in "will ignore".
I tried many times with no luck. Shame really, because @reddit.com could be deployed like really really fast.
I guess I'll give it another go perhaps. Maybe use a promoted ad to get their attention (and support Reddit in the process :) )
I remember our initial calculations were interesting to everyone involved.
they could do a /r/forRent, etc. also. Reddit has a lot of opportunities. Let's hope the CEO can figure out how to captialize on some of them.
I wonder if then that speaks to interesting business opportunities? There appears then to be a misalignment between traditional industries and what people are actually interested in.
They need someone with deep, intimate knowledge of the community and the product. The best source for that in my opinion would be internal.
Zuckerberg, Gates, Page, ...
Sounds like you should have said "they still have someone within who could do it!"
Granted, they were rather autonomous (one reason why I know I stayed until the end of my contract) but with money in the bank, the new CEO can simply do things as easily as any of the other startups in the top 50. Before, that money would be going through some other big company approval process -- e.g., if reddit wants to hire away a fabulous programmer, it simply gets done.
If things go well, reddit continues to grow and increase its value, at which point, it could potentially be acquired, IPO [RDIT?], or just become a cash cow for Condé Nast.
If Reddit's going to monetize effectively (and that's a big 'if'), it needs to be operationally independent so it can get creative.
As a stand-alone entity, they won't be subject to those rules, and Condé Nast doesn't have to worry about the rest of its companies saying, "but reddit did it".
"The move comes after Conde talked to several investors about selling off a chunk of the company as part of the spinout;"
Reddit doesn't need more money, it needs to be brave, slap up some real advertising, and start generating real revenue.
A website that does 100m pageviews, but makes $10m/yr profit is better than one that does 500m pageviews but makes no profit.
Note that a deal at that valuation did not go through, and that likely that valuation was an important reason why it didn't.
Reddit would be perfect for it, and for campuses with less generous email policies. It doesn't interfere with work communication and its better suited for the sort of discussions and arguments that email often plays host to.
As a student, I can't speak much for companies. And I'm aware of Reddit's recent College promotion and how easy it is to make, moderate, etc a new Reddit. But a dedicated Reddit integrated with college websites or email could be a profit stream.
FTFY: This change is all about setting up reddit so that it can be be sold.
1. paid mobile apps 2. paid API access 3. build an internal Flattr like service 4. offline events 5. go compete with Disqus
I would like to see reddit release a product where I, can implement a forum system much like reddit but completely autonomous and hosted on their own service - basically a replacement to the dreaded phpBB. Hell, I'd pay for it.
From http://www.betabeat.com/2011/09/06/a-startup-is-reborn-reddi...:
Greater independence will mean reddit can go to a new board, which includes reddit OG Alexix Ohanian, who had been serving as an “advisor,” as well as representatives from Conde and Advance, with proposals instead of jockeying within Conde’s budget. Reddit doesn’t plan to seek outside funding at this time, Mr. Martin said, but it’s not out of the question. “It’s a lot more more of a startup,” he said. “It’s able to happen faster with less overhead.”
How much? I'd say 50M$ would be adequate.
2 adverts for reddit merchandise,
1 reddit flash game,
1 advert for reddit gold,
1 for a subreddit,
1 "thanks for not using adblock",
1 for the reddit ad system,
1 for a conference called poptech
and then on 3 pages I saw "sponsored links".
Since the community is less vigilant than it used to, I assume that the newcomers are less concerned about commerce.
I think an online service could revolutionise the way we all read and digest news, Reddit is the first stepping stone in this revolution but I expect it to be overtaken soon by a superior service (The same way Facebook has MySpace).
I really hope they actually listen to you. Would you consider taking the CEO job there? Best possible outcome.
There's just no pleasing you guys...
Has it not been a train wreck in terms of profitability? Or is Reddit making a few hundred million in profit nowadays?
Best of luck, and congratulations.
They have also, in my opinion, implemented mainstream and niche news so well (via subreddits) that they're not in immediate danger of being replaced by another aggregate news and/or niche site.
so was Digg, and Fark before it, and Slashdot before that.
Am I wrong? History shows that these sites are basically popular for a certain amount of time, and then they lose huge market share when they inevitably do something to sour the community-at-large (like trying to monetize).
Reddit figured out how to support subcommunities in a way that those other sites never did. In my opinion that's what's different.
See also: social networks. Every social network was a passing fad...until Facebook wasn't.
You meant it hasn't so far. That's not a dig at Facebook, or a prediction of death, but on the short timescale we're looking at (a few years really) it's much to soon to know whether they've stopped the cycle, or made it slower. And therefore you can extent that to Reddit, the fact that they've gone longer without decline doesn't mean they won't start their decline tomorrow, or the next day.
The context is a hypothesis that this type of site will grow and eventually die down - and assuming that hypothesis, it's too early to say whether Reddit has changed that trend or just changed how long it takes. I'd say that in another 10 years, if it starts to die then, it would have gone long enough to say it changed the trend. But right now, too soon.
Am I making (rough) sense?
http://soshable.com/reddit-traffic-has-exploded-in-12-months...
I'd say they're not in immediate danger because they're not making a profit and most businesses that have the sort of money needed to support such an effort (ie the large traffic) don't want to waste money on something that's not going to make a profit. Indeed Conde Nast appear to have only recently and quite reluctantly allowed reddit some more resources.
Explosive growth in traffic, yes, what's the balance sheet look like.
Now they spun them out so other people can finance it without it being their sole burden.
Reddit is owned by a publishing company that's lost interest in keeping it around, it's not nearly as big as Twitter or YouTube yet, and it has one of the worst audiences imaginable for monetization. I wouldn't say it's dying per se, but they have to start thinking about how they're going to pay for all those new servers and all that new staff.