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Comment by brown9-2 | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain what benefit Conde Nast sees in owning reddit?

I'm not trying to be offensive or anything, I just don't understand how reddit fits into the Conde Nast business.

(and yeah, I realize this question is about three years late to the party)

I think the demographic that uses reddit is often regarded as the most difficult and skeptical demographic to market to. Owning reddit probably gives them some fairly useful data and allows them to monitor trends and perhaps better position their more-for-retail brands to attract this user-base.

I agree with this sentiment, though I wish the reality were more like your theory for smarter brand positioning. On paper, it's a very attractive demographic -- 26 median age, pre-dominently male, affluent and well-educated.

It's oft pitched as Wired readers, only about a decade younger (Wired is an extremely well loved brand by advertisers).

It says a lot about society in general when you consider Reddit users to be "well-educated".

During the courtship, here's how I pitched it:

* Programming talent: Conde would be getting the foundation of an uber-talented programming culture in team reddit, which is the only way to beget more talented programmers (because I think you'll all agree that people like me -- that is, non-programmers -- can evaluate programming talent).

* Valuable destination: A community of the tastemakers for most of the Internet. Like it or not, most hot Internet links that aren't about nudity are first on the front page of reddit. Owning this front page of the web is an attractive proposition. Monetizing it is a bit more work, but we have always been a very scrappy [cheap] shop. Looking at 7M uniques this month with 6.5 employees (4.5 come Nov).

* Geek cred: This might be a bit of a stretch if I hadn't heard from folks like Ars Technica's Ken Fisher that the reddit acquisition (and how well it went) helped the decision to accept Conde's acquisiton offer. Furthermore, if you're thinking about hiring programmers down the line - because you know the Internet represents the future of publishing - it helps your pitch a bit more to say you own reddit than, say, Vogue.

Is reddit profitable (or could be)? That would be benefit enough.

I don't think every enterprise a company is engaged in must synergestically complement its other enterprises.

... especially Conde Nast. The advantages to running a media company "at scale" are many. Having a large selection of highly targetable demographics means that the ad sellers have "inventory" to pitch to whatever advertisers they want -- especially if they do things like present aggregate yearly incomes and so forth (which I assume Reddit would inflate.)

On a more important note, I think that they are just trying to bring the worlds of nerds and GQ together to bring about world peace.. ;)

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