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Comment by bh42222 | Hacker News Reader

When this is the easiest way to give your growing product what it needs to grow as fast as it can....

Also, anyone think 200mil is a bit cheap for reddit?

If anything I think it's a bit high. The reddit community is so unruly that monetizing the site effectively is a major challenge. It makes a good chunk of money but it's very far from profitable I'd guess.

As an advertiser on Reddit, I have to say the UX for advertisers is one of the worst ones I've ever had to use.

They could probably vastly increase ad sale conversions if they spent a week redesigning and optimizing it.

>The reddit community is so unruly that monetizing the site effectively is a major challenge.

Where unruly means willing to vote with their feet?

The biggest problem is that what users are getting at reddit isn't worth all that much and can easily be found in other places online. The second problem is that due to what it is, reddit attracts a greater level of people who don't care for common monitization practices.

I think by unruly he means that the majority of their users are either 12 years old or act like they're 12 years old. I know that they have an underground that only hangs out on sub-reddits but I would bet those users are in the minority.

> reddit attracts a greater level of people who don't care for common monitization practices.

That's a polite way of putting it. Every ad I've seen with a comments thread has people mostly slagging off the advertiser. Ads without comment threads frequently get nasty threads posted about them, which at least isn't as visible, but if I were in charge of buying ads it would make me wonder why I should continue paying to be attacked.

I imagine the idea is that this system should eventually lead to ads that the community actually likes - but I'll admit that doesn't seem to be happening. However, I think that most ads that reddit rages about are pretty terribe ads. For example, a recent ad for a movie (Apollo 18) was hated on because clicking on it sent you to a Facebook login page. That's no good since many people now can't learn about this movie through the ad without signing up for a different website.

Another example: I think there was a recent Microsoft ad that took you an unrelated webpage. Again, that ad is no good.

The community comments on these things because there have been a lot of terrible ads - ads that don't even let users learn about the product being advertised. However, it doesn't seem like this is actually leading to better ads...

That's a polite way of putting it.

But thats all it is. They're on a website where the community actively discusses their opinion of submissions, and it was their opinion that the ad or advertized product wasn't good.

I haven't been to reddit in a while, but when I did, I saw that when an advertiser had a good product (I'm recalling A Small Orange or rsync.net) and understood that they didn't need patronizing or dumb ads, the comments were mostly inquiring about the service, or users saying they were happy with it.

That's what happened with the old kuro5hin ads also, which also had comment threads by default. Non-annoying ads that seemed like they had some idea of what community they were targeting typically got good responses; annoying ads that looked like they had no idea where they were advertising didn't. Of course, some advertisers mixed the two, and deliberately antagonized the audience to get attention (http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/12/5/1923/79187).

> Also, anyone think 200mil is a bit cheap for reddit?

Are they profitable yet after 6 years? I'd say 200mil is ridiculously expensive.

But then we live in an age where a location based photo sharing app for dogs is probably worth a few billion to some investor.

200 million cheap?

You're kidding right? If not, what multiple of profits would you think is reasonable for an established business?

What amazes me is that reddit as it is today would be valued at more than several 10's of millions.

Yet if it were a startup just out of the gates with some funding, I'm sure we'd be hearing about it having a mythical valuation in the high tens of billions.

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