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Comment by 6thSigma | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how Reddit will monetize in the future. They have been pretty anti-advertisements for the longest time (they have some of the least invasive ads on the net IMO). I read awhile back that they were losing millions of dollars a year. They really need to increase the features of Reddit Gold for that to become a viable option for users rather than looked at as a "donation."

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What they should do is do it the same as Wikipedia. I'm not sure what Reddit's costs are like, but if they did a donation drive where it was a choice of donating or more ads, I bet the community would chip in.

They have a "Gold" feature that does something like this.

http://www.reddit.com/gold/about

Yeah, I think they gotta do more than that though. Go straight up like Jimmy Wales and just say we need X dollars, if you want reddit to stay up. Maybe give reddit gold as a bonus to everyone who donates.

The biggest problem with Reddit Gold is it seems like a feature you can live without (especially if you use reddit enhancement suite). They don't emphasize enough that it's a donation to keep the site going.

Totally random idea, but maybe they could offer support for paid, private sub-Reddits and take a cut. There are a few I'd pay (a small amount) for.

The userbase would balk. Private subreddits are already a feature. Asking users to pay money for something they currently use for free would tick off power users who have ungodly influence among the users. I think I get what you're talking about, but Reddit is not like Github enough to pull that off.

They do have that feature and it's free.

Wikipedia is shady at best about how much money they actually need from the community. Reddit does not internet to receive people into giving up money. The recent push to giving gold sounds pretty cool.

I would guess their costs are several steps above Wikipedia. Yes, Wikipedia is pretty much ubiquitous, but I know personally that I only visit Wikipedia occasionally (i.e. not every day) and I only visit a few pages. On the other hand, when I was an active redditor, I'd visit hundreds of reddit pages every day.

Tack on the part where bandwidth is more expensive than equivalent amounts of storage, and you've got yourself a reddit that costs a lot more than Wikipedia.

I'm willing to bet Wikipedia uses far more bandwidth than Reddit. Reddit barely hosts any images, it's mostly just all text, plus plenty of sites hotlink Wikipedia images.

This is a good point, reddit has plenty of images but they are generally hosted elsewhere. The images they do host directly are fairly static, and can be cached.

That might be viable, but I can imagine that wikipedia receives a large portion of it's donations from the charitable perspective that donating to wikipedia equals furthering human knowledge. Or something to that effect.

Reddit... well it's mainly a time sink.

And Wikimedia is a not for profit organization. Giving to a for profit is always going to be different.

why should anyone avoid ads so much? I dont think a ad or two will degrade user experience.

I do not think ads will be efficient on reddit.com due users who are quite anti-ads.

I'm not sure you'd find a website user anywhere that isn't.

Two obvious monetizing ideas that would be more or less community compatible:

1) you sign up for reddit gold, you get https access to the "nice" servers that have very low load, low latency, tons of BW, cached (fast) image links ... Non-donators get "the best effort swamp" which doesn't work any worse than it does now, but who doesn't want a faster UI?

2) data mining. Hey "big rich corporation" for only $1000 (a month?) I'll send you a detailed monthly report of what "the internet" REALLY says about you, or your industry segment, or the world in general. Presumably your PR people will be fascinated. You could hire a couple interns to slowly search via the UI and/or google but we have the raw DB data ready to automatically mine and we can summarize it for you far cheaper and more effectively than you could by yourself.

Data mining has been mentioned before on Reddit. Admins aren't keen.

http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/15kz08/til_re...

Sources? I'm curious, and I hadn't heard that they were losing money. Seems silly that they'd be added people on a regular basis if they were doing so poorly.

http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/12v8y3/now_is_the_time...

^ Reddit`s CEO.

Interesting, it looks like they're trying to become app.net and not twitter, for all the right reasons.

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