Condé Nast finally throws Reddit a bone, new hires coming

http://blog.reddit.com/2011/02/reddit-undergoes-dramatic-expansion.html

by logicalmoron • 15 years ago

91 39 15 years ago

blog.reddit.com

fourply• 15 years ago

i am trying to be generally optimistic, but it seems pretty likely that Conde Nast is going to eventually want to monetize the reddit community in ways that no one will like. without some sort of payoff at the end of the road, i can't imagine why they'd agree to additional hires.

tesseract3• 15 years ago

CN could start by helping reddit sell their banner ad inventory... it's got to be less than 1% of the time that I see a real ad, rather than reddit self-promotions or something for another CN property running in that slot.

presidentender• 15 years ago

"Something for another CN property" could well be the payoff.

cryptoz• 15 years ago

It doesn't sound like CN has really changed their attitude much. The news in this blog post is fantastic! But it sounds like the money is coming from Gold subscribers, not CN. Reddit is either already bigger than Wired - or probably will be soon...they have > 1 billion pageviews / month. It's totally crazy that they run the site with about 5 people.

I've been there for almost five years, and I have to say I've loved every minute of it. Back then it was smaller and nerdier, and now it's all big and popular but you can still find the same cozy space in the smaller communities (/r/coding, /r/compsci, for example).

cagenut2• 15 years ago

pageviews aren't what matter anymore, UV/month is.

comscore's january numbers just came out this morning. Wired droped 38% from 9.4 to 5.9 million. In one month. Hopefully for their sake thats a javascript screw up.

reddit rose 11% from 1.0 to 1.1 million. Again, in one month.

so if you were to over-extrapolate here you could say that reddit will overtake wired maybe late this year, but as it stands now wired is >6x bigger a media property.

SystemOut• 15 years ago

I think it depends on the kind of web-site you are running more than anything as to which metrics are important. Just like in finance, depending on the business model, different metrics are tracked (e.g. free cash flow, revenue, etc.). Plus, hardly ever is a single metric important. Sites will look at page views for new/existing visitors, bounce rates for new visitors, time on site, etc. depending on their goals.

What this tells you, though, is that if they are only seeing 1.1 million unique visitors a month that those visitors account for 1,000 page views a month which is a lot. And that's the average! I bet a lot of sites would love to have that number.

citricsquid• 15 years ago

How do UVs matter more now, for advertisers?

wheels• 15 years ago

> reddit rose 11% from 1.0 to 1.1 million

The numbers that they show (the same place the one-billion pageviews stat comes from) indicate that they're now closer to 14 million monthly uniques:

http://www.reddit.com/tb/fdyyf

joshu• 15 years ago

Comscore numbers vary wildly for sites that don't reconcile their numbers w/ comscore's. And only sites that publish rate cards for displa ads really do that.

I remember once when comscore reported that delicious had dropped to 44k uniques when we had millions of actives, much less uniques.

masklinn• 15 years ago

> The news in this blog post is fantastic! But it sounds like the money is coming from Gold subscribers, not CN.

I doubt gold money is sufficient to hire 4 persons. But revenue has one important property, which the admins explained last time around, and the one before: when they have revenue and growth to show, they can make inroad with CN. The last pair of hires were not self-funded, they were based on Reddit finally demonstrating a way to make money.

I expect the same thing for this round.

wildmXranat• 15 years ago

Hmm, I wonder if this announcement comes on the heels of momentum where users are not renewing the gold subscriptions. I'm not sure of that and I'm purely speculating, but I think the average initial subscription amount was about $10 and those would expiring around now. Just guessing.

This sort of action would be a good way for CN to rope back in any doubters that their $$ will benefit the site.

edit: I know they indeed beefed up investments in hardware and I was referring to hiring more devs.

tesseract3• 15 years ago

That or maybe the users are renewing, giving reddit some confidence to make a long term commitment by hiring, rather than spending the subscription money on hardware.

dhughes2• 15 years ago

Reddit has been down for two days maybe that was the kick in the pants they needed.

mkr-hn• 15 years ago

Reddit is down half the time because people flocked to it when Digg went south. Any team would struggle to keep up with that kind of growth.

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/digg.com+reddit.com/

A sudden influx of 100k people overnight is not easy to manage.

The number on the visits graph is even more substantial.

dhughes2• 15 years ago

Well not half but quite a bit since the digg diaspora, but lately it's been especially bad lately.

hessenwolf• 15 years ago

Well, some of us were knocked on to hacker news as a result. It's like a cashflow waterfall. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securitization

kprobst• 15 years ago

I wish there was a way for these guys to disengage from the Death Star and go independent. It doesn't seem like living inside CN has a ton of advantages anyway.

Maybe the ultimate Reddit community project would be to raise a large amount of capital to buy the site from CN.

lbrandy• 15 years ago

> I wish there was a way for these guys to disengage from the Death Star and go independent.

I've wondered the same thing before. Is there any precedent for such a thing?

Here's a dumb way to do it: find enough funding and convince, oh, half of reddit to join the new venture. It is, after all, mostly open source. Heh.

100k• 15 years ago

> It doesn't seem like living inside CN has a ton of advantages anyway.

It did for the founders!

sachinag• 15 years ago

Ben Huh has offered to negotiate with Conde Nast for Reddit. He also has $30 million in new investor cash that he's sitting on.

Also, this: http://www.itworld.com/offbeat/134411/animated-take-cheezbur...

honeycrisp• 15 years ago

Yeah, but being owned by Ben Huh wouldn't be any better than being owned by Conde Nast. It would probably be far worse.

amadiver• 15 years ago

I used to work for the internet arm of Condé in NYC in the mid aughts. The cafeteria was amazing; they'd have some big-deal chef in each week to work a lunch shift (though people would usually smoke instead of eating). The women there were also incredibly attractive -- it helped having Vogue in the same building. I have no idea what their San Francisco offices are like, but if they're anything like New York, it makes working there almost worth it. ...

almost...

KMStraub• 15 years ago

This is indeed great news, but I can't believe what CN has done to this company. Well, I actually can because I worked at CN for 4 years and saw extremely little investment in long-term digital strategy. There were a lot of tricks being thought of to try to get an edge, but they still have too many print dinosaurs who are terrified of losing their jobs calling the shots. And I'm not saying these print dinosaurs couldn't very easily evolve and learn what they need to learn and be what the publisher needs to stay afloat. I'm saying there's this cloud of fear looming over everyone's heads there that's suffocating any potential for innovation.

iamelgringo• 15 years ago

The engineering team at Reddit manages 250M pageviews per engineer. That has to be some kind of record. Has any other site ever hit the Alexa 100 with only 4 engineers?

Kudos.

mdonahoe• 15 years ago

Perhaps Craigslist?

30 employees and 20 billion pageviews/month. Not clear how many of those people are engineers.

http://www.craigslist.org/about/factsheet

pg makes reference to it in this essay http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html

moe2• 15 years ago

I find it amusing how many people still assume that a site with many page views somehow needs to have a big engineering team behind it.

Yes, 1 billion page views is a relatively serious load, technically. But there's not much difference between a small team building the software to handle it and a huge enterprise department doing the same.

In fact, the small team will often produce better results. When given enough motivation, money and coffee.

taken11• 15 years ago

thepiratebay?

khafra• 15 years ago

Plentyoffish claims to get 500M pageviews per month, and is run by just the one guy.

I can't speak for the taste and discernment of the people who visited that site 500M times, though.

nbpoole• 15 years ago

...and Reddit is currently down (well, in emergency read-only mode). :(

forwardslash• 15 years ago

Where do you go when Reddit is down?

Condé Nast finally throws Reddit a bone, new hires coming

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