Time to hire some business folks? Really, now it is not the time to talk about server expansion or more page views. The highest priority now is monetization. They need to come up with ways to get paid sufficiently to expand.
Here are the things they can do:
1. Place more ads. I don't buy the notion that many reddit users run ad-blockers. Even half of them do, you still get 140M/month page views.
2. Get Google AdSense, to place content-related ads.
3. Sponsorship. Have companies to sponsor some subreddits and add companies promotion and events.
4. Paid submission, clearly marked so. Company ad and product/service announcement can go there. E.g. all the webhosting promotion deals going on now.
5. Create some deal/coupon/onsales subreddits. Have companies feed them and pay for them. Rather than just having user-generated content, have companies generated content as well, and get paid for them.
6. CPA revenue sharing. Give redditers some percentage of discount when they go to a merchant's site to purchase something from a reddit link. Reddit takes a cut. It's a win-win-win setup, merchant sells a product minus the marketing cost which becomes the redditers' discount and reddit's share.
There are so many ways to skin this cat. They are sitting on a good problem to have. Why are they fumbling on this?
Thanks for the suggestions. Some we have tried, others we would like to, and some are totally new.
The big problem is that we spend most of our time just keeping the site up and don't have time to focus on these ideas, and Conde is unwilling to invest.
We're hoping the reddit gold money gives us the flexibility to bring in the talent we need to make some of those ideas happen.
I've had experience successfully monetizing all sorts of low-quality traffic, and I can tell you that it's possible to get decent CPM from any type of users, even users like redditors who don't click on ads as much.
You should be able to easily pull at least $2 CPM from general/frontpage reddit traffic, and probably closer to $10 CPM from specific subreddits. At 280M pageviews, that's over $500K a month in revenue you're missing out on.
If I had to monetize reddit right now, I would throw up some CPM ads from a premium display network, and then begin aggressively going after big brand advertisers and media buyers. This might mean spending money and hiring at least one ad sales person- but the investment will recoup itself many times over when media buys from big brands start coming in.
Right now, reddit is doing a TERRIBLE job of managing ad inventory, particularly remnant inventory. It also doesn't look easy for advertisers to place ads on reddit. I see a contact form for more information about advertising, but where is your media kit? User demographics?
Not all ads are bad, only untargeted ones are. Why aren't there ads for Newegg, or Snorg tees, or collegehumor, etc on reddit? You're in a position to demand premium CPM from advertisers and you're squandering the opportunity.
Right now the ad I see on the front page is "advertise on reddit". This is a terribly wasteful use of remnant impressions, as 99% of your users won't be interested in buying ads, and there is no reason to show them this ad. It will take a few minutes to fill that remnant inventory with a reputable brand ad from a display network.
I understand that you don't want to piss off your users with ads, but Digg manages to generate revenue with strategically placed banner ads without any outcry from users.
I think this problem isn't unique to reddit- it seems like a lot of startups run exclusively by engineers have trouble monetizing intelligently, even when they get significant traffic.
My email is my profile if you want to chat about this further, I can send some links to the kinds of offers redditors might respond to or help you reach out to media buyers who might be interested in doing large buys on sites like reddit.
For another perspective from someone with experience: I'd say $500k is about 2-3x times higher than what's reasonable to expect, without a really good direct sales.
You don't think throwing up a 300x250 banner on the front page from somewhere like RightMedia could get a premium site like reddit $2 CPM? I bet even low traffic quality sites like icanhazcheesburger or cracked are getting more than $2 CPM.
By the way, reddit can really learn from Demand Media sites like Cracked, who are very very good at monetizing the same type of low quality social media traffic.
It's because they don't know shit about advertising. Take a look at their "sponsored link" system. It's impossible for an advertiser to predict what impressions or click-throughs they will get for their ad spend.
While I wouldn't have put it as crudely as megablahblah he has a point, the unusual ad pricing structure probably puts off quite a few potential ad buyers.
Sorry for the tone, but I explained this to them in one of their Reddit announcement posts about their sponsored links, and their response was such that they had no concept of how advertising worked and acted like I was the one that was wrong. Now a few months later, they're begging their users for donations.
il lays out exactly what they need to do, so there isn't much else to suggest. Simply set up some ad placements on the site and get set up as a publisher with the ad network of their choice. The network does all the sales. (Edit: Later on, they can get into do their own direct sales, sponsorships, etc.) They actually were signed up as a publisher for an ad network for a while, I think, because I remember some ad taking over the screen and everyone freaking out. Maybe that scared them away from the idea because they couldn't control the ad types, I don't know.
I don't know what their mobile numbers are, but they need to get set up as a publisher with a mobile ad network too, such as Ad Mob, Millennial or Quattro.
And since they don't know how anything works, they need to get a few thousand dollars and hire a consultant to explain it all to them. I know they are sensitive about pissing off users, but I suspect that their conversations with Conde Nast and any ad network have ended up in frustrated conversations that go nowhere because they don't understand each other. They need a marketing consultant that understands both worlds to bridge the communication gap. Yes, I'm available.
I'm dubious. I don't use reddit, but I just skimmed the site. You're totally right, reddit has done a shit job allowing people to advertise. That being said, I have some experience with monetization, and forum traffic, dominated as it is by page refreshes, monetizes like shit. For starters, pv per user is way higher than almost any other type of site. All display advertisers cut individual users off pretty quickly -- IME often under 3 pv per day -- after which you're purely displaying remnant inventory at $.1 to $.3 ecpm.
That said, they should immediately experiment w/ adsense, pubcenter, ideas ala stack overflow of embedding amazon referrals onto all books (not at all obnoxious IME), and some of the better display advertisers. Most of these are free and come with basically no commitment so why not. Also, they should embed quantcast's tracking pixel to get some idea about their demographics in a much cheaper fashion than comscore (NB: this could be misconstrued as an advertisement but I think it's good advice.)
The way to approach Conde is to present a concrete business plan for monetization and ask separate budget for it. What you have in place now is operational budget, just to keep the site up. If you ask them for more money to expand server capacity to support more page view, they will roll their eyes saying, great, sinking more good money into the operation hole. Business people see operation cost as something to cut, unless it brings in additional revenue.
Tell them your priority has shifted from gaining market share (page views) to bigger margin (profit=revenue-cost). Business people like increasing margin. And tell them you need to do a number of experiments to figure out what work, which cost additional money. Tell them there are two options: 1. give a new budget for monetization while keeping the existing operational budget, which is already thin in keeping the current site SLA. 2. Cut the operational budget in half, reduce site SLA, and divert the other half to monetization. Reducing SLA means having less servers, less operational staff, slower site, more crash, less visitors coming in, and some unpopular moves to increase conversion. But that's ok since as part of the plan you've stopped seeking for market share.
Be bold and ask more for a new budget. Say you need 20 more racks initially, 9 sales, 2 marketing, 2 biz dev, 4 more engr, and 3 managers. And need 20 more backend servers for the new initiative; dealing with merchants aren't cheap. You need the sales guys to sign up merchants, the marketing guys to figure out what work and manage ad campaigns, the biz dev guys to recruit big merchants like Dell or Amazon and managing ad inventory, and the engineers to build up the merchant facing infrastructure.
Excite them by painting huge upside monetization potential, which is true. Targeted CPC can be very lucrative, like minting money. Online merchants typically will budget 10%-15% on marketing, which is what pays CPC. Think how big the online ecommerce is and take 10% of that. That's why those merchant specific subreddits, deal/coupon, whatnot are so important because the redditers clicking out from those links are very qualified leads for the merchants who are willing to pay dear money for them.
If Conde is still unwilling to invest, then that's just life. Stop investing in increasing operational capacity. Accept the fact that site will run slower and have less visitors. That's fine. That's the max capacity of the site given the budget. Just enjoy the ride. And wait until Conde sells it to someone else who's willing to take it to the next level.
I don't really understand the notion that people hate Ads. People hate irrelevant ads. I'm stoked when an Ad reminds me of a new CD that came out of a band I like, or the latest book that people have been talking about, etc.
I really think targeted Ads are the way to go. Hell, I wouldn't even mind filling out information to help target ads.
I hate ads with animations in them no matter how targeted. If it moves I block it aggressively. If it doesn't move, I even click on it sometimes to support the site.
This could actually be the kind of problem that's solvable by engineering. Make a simple and easy to use ad creation interface. Let me spend as much as I want for ads on certain subreddits/geoips. Make a system that sets the price by bidding, and that allows flagging/voting on an ad. Then advertise it.
It's incidentally what I think 4chan is missing too. Not necessarily for /b/, but the domain oriented boards coupled with some geoip would make for some pretty targeted ads. I think it's a pretty big loss not letting the little guy spend his $100 if he wants too.
I'd do craigslist style classified subreddits I think, it works in well with the strong community aspect and there are already has strong geographical subreddits. But I'm not going to donate to reddit just so you guys can sell my eyeballs to advertisers better.
What amazes me most about Reddit, apart from it's apparently Craigslist inspire design, is that there is only the most sheepish attempts to advertise.
As a registered user you know all the stories I've clicked on, all the stories I've voted for, and the sections I'm following, and with all this information you can't do something meaningful like put an ad or a "suggested link" for a product or service I'd like. I see links to the most random crap ever.
Why is it so hard to apply some sort of affinity metric to the advertising problem?
The sad truth is that if Reddit doesn't advertise, if the developer time is simply spent putting out fires, then it will end up being an irrelevant property. There is an amazing community there, which is a credit to what the site has managed so far, but that community will simply migrate to a better platform. It happened with Digg, it happened with Slashdot, and sadly it is inevitable that it will happen to Reddit unless some big changes are made.
Although I find many aspects of Facebook to be in outrageously bad taste, or rudely invasive, the one thing they've managed to do as a company is grow, build out, and become highly profitable. There are a lot of things Facebook does that are worth studying in meticulous detail, deconstructing and re-implementing, from their process, to their features, to their strategy to maintain growth. Their capability to execute on complicated technical problems is spectacular.
If Conde is unwilling to invest, maybe the best plan is to seek investors to buy out the property and make it an independent venture that's more focused on the site.
Their attitude is somewhat Twitterish. They aren't going to scare off their readers with minor, unobtrusive advertising, and should just go ahead and be more direct about it. Strike while the iron is hot, make some money.
I wouldn't mind seeing single sentence google adwords in the comment sections, perhaps 1 for every 30 comments. Bonus points if they got worked into the pun threads.
Something is seriously odd, here. I used to see $25 a month or so from an art-related site that got very little traffic in comparison. Unless you were just exaggerating for effect?
First, he lives in Cupertino. Coffee there might cost $25, I'm not sure.
Then, Google payments have been declining for a long time. We tried AdSense and I STILL haven't made enough to get Google to send a check (nice how they'll hang on to your $80 to the end of time, hmm? Wonder how much free advertising Google scams that way). Then, we switched to our own ads and make approx. 800 times as much per day (not an exaggeration).
User demographics are very, very different. I'm betting most reditters are aware of Google AdSense (and consider it kind of lame?). But hardly any of your visitors may be aware of AdSense and may have actually considered as good-ol-relevant-link.
They had Google AdSense there when Reddit first launched, before they made their first ad deal with Federated Media. I'm not privy to what the numbers were, but I imagine they weren't good.
You should also ask them about their "Flattr for comments" model. I can't remember where I heard about it, it might not even be implemented yet. Anyways, the idea is to give the site hosting the user generated content (comments etc.) part of the revenue. When you've upvoted a comment you could get the option to Flattr it, if you have added Flattr to you profile etc.
Yes I think they have a Maserati problem. Or rather, they could have a Maserati problem if they simply flipped the right switch, given the high traffic and community/fanbase they now have. Most startups would love to have their problem.
I have to say, this looks bad for the whole "users first, revenue later" mantra. Now, admittedly, the founders got paid on the flip. But there are users, and now it's later, so... where is the revenue?
I heard this moment described as the "where is the land" moment. The crew has been sailing the ocean for a long time and they're running on slim hope. They grumble, then complain, and finally they confront the captain and say, "You promised us land. Where is the land?!"
This doesn't look like a good resolution to the "where is the land" moment. Why decide to plead for cash? It's the business model of last resort.
So yeah, this is definitely a cry for help. Unfortunately, it's one that reminds me a lot of the drowning article. I think this is Reddit grabbing its users and trying to climb on top of them.
Where is the revenue? I think that blog post, 1700 upvotes, and 1400 comments is pretty good indication of the possible revenue. Hint: it'll probably be more than the 3 readers of my blog will be ponying up this year.
I strongly doubt it. I can't see a public-media-style "pledge week" as a primary source of revenue for a for-profit company.
I think the best outcome would be that this is a one-time weird thing that happened before they found a real revenue model. That wouldn't be unprecedented at all, although every time I can think of, this happens before the founders sell to a large company who can monetize well. For example, I donated to faqs.org when it was just some guy, and now it's owned by some site aggregator I've never heard of. Which is fine with me, because I just wanted to keep it around.
But assuming this works spectacularly, doesn't this just make Reddit completely illiquid? How can you go about selling a company based on revenues that are primarily free-will gifts? What would you sell, a share of profits from people just giving the company money? And what would you tell your donating customers who have zero ownership? Maybe that's all okay, or maybe I don't get it -- is there some way for this to succeed that I'm missing here?
Yeah, I'm just probably not being imaginative enough. Even if you give someone a tiny bit of status that says they're a member, that's what they're "paying for," even if it costs nothing. And all the psychic benefits just happen to be lurking behind that.
I just can't believe this is where you go to before exhausting everything else, though. Just up and asking your customers to give you money like this has got to change your relationship, just like lending or giving money to a friend, right? I have to say I am fascinated to see how this plays out.
"Just up and asking your customers to give you money like this has got to change your relationship, just like lending or giving money to a friend, right?"
When taken out of context, that sounds remarkably absurd. ;-)
It's an interesting development, simply because most businesses throughout history have demanded that you give them money before you receive service. Or they bill you afterwards with the full force of law behind their threats. Very few will give you the service first and then ask nicely for money.
I'm hoping that it works out, simply because if it doesn't, I'd bet that we won't see very many businesses using this strategy in the future. OTOH, I have no plans to subscribe - Reddit just isn't worth all that much to me.
Yeah, I needed to weasel-ify it some more so it was clear I was talking about outright giving instead of giving in an exchange -- I probably should have just called it "donating" consistently. :)
The thing that's interesting is that they're clearly willing to go for the donation angle. Again, the line is so thin that you wonder why they don't just announce they're selling you a digital doodad for an inflated price with the understanding that it's essentially a donation. It's something that works for PBS selling $100 DVDs but maybe the worry is that it triggers the "outrageous price" receptor...
This looks like a straight up request for charity. As they say in their blog post, they will not be able to offer any new features, at the current time, in exchange for you subscribing. I would feel uncomfortable with that business model, if I was them. Admittedly, National Public Radio survives that way, but then, NPR is registered as a non-profit, and donations are tax deductible.
I think that this is an attempt to keep the users first. If the users love the service enough to pay for it, there will be no need for potentially-user-experience-degrading changes like sponsored subreddits.
I think if any site could pull this off, Reddit could. Somehow, somewhere, someway, Reddit became a social news site that has a strong sense of community to it. Redditors feel good being "Redditors", and feel an affinity towards the site. My prediction is this actually works.
Having met a couple of the reddit guys, I gladly donated. They're the ones running the site and deciding how it evolves - not some faceless corporate drones at Conde.
No doubt, I gladly donated. I'd rather see a site asking for donations if their user-friendly business model isn't quite making enough then it turning into some kind of profit-driven popup-banner mess. Sometimes the community just needs to support the free services it enjoys, be it Wikipedia, Apache or Reddit.
Their own by a massive company though, I don't think the people above them would be looking for donations as a business plan if they want to hire more staff. I agree with your point of supporting the services the community enjoys but I think in this case they will have to take some more drastic measures.
I would love it if totalfarke...(err, I mean, "reddit gold members") also got labeled (perhaps after a review by a mod or something) as "definitely not spammers".
Just today I was being told to wait 10 minutes between postings...even though I'm definitely not a spammer, and have very positive karma (2000 after about 3 months).
Well the community there has adapted to that particular comment layout. They also favor long and rich comments since they are a community of writers, which reflects the comment layouts, if I'm not mistaken.
I bought a t-shirt from kn0thing at startup school a few years ago, but I can't really see paying for reddit now. I wish them luck in finding a business model that works for them.
If I had to point to just one thing, it would be that you succeeded. When I joined reddit, I think there may have been more sockpuppets than real users. A great deal of what was posted there satisfied my intellectual curiosity, and when comments were finally added, they tended to be well-reasoned and insightful. The community was small, and mostly populated with people who had interests similar to mine (many came from comp.lang.lisp).
Today's reddit is pretty mainstream, and, aside from a few subreddits, the content doesn't interest me much. The subreddits that do interest me have similar content to HN, and I already find myself spending too much time reading and discussing stories here when I should be working on my product.
I don't think reddit can be "fixed" so that I would return to be a heavy user again, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
I agree pretty much completely with this. I've also seen the same cycle happen over and over again: I was one of the beta testers for Digg.
At a certain point I think you just get tired. I can't count the number of times that I've posted a straightforward technical response, then downvoted, and said that my opinion is worthless unless I provide sources and that the commenter is a highly paid consultant so he knows what he is talking about.
For example, just about a month ago it looked like someone was confused about a basic systems issue. I posted with a quick comment about the nature of optimization in the memory hierarchy which featured a well-known result in standard CS literature. You know, there are times when I don't mind digging through IPDPS or the ACM for proper citations, but a lot of the time I resent the fact that the argumenter didn't even take the time to do some basic research about the topic. As I said, I get tired.
I'd love to give you the reason why I decided just the other day that I want to leave reddit pretty much for good. I have been a fairly active user for the past 2 years or so, both commenting on and submitting content to reddit. When I joined I was fleeing digg's transformation into a 4chan wannabe. Over the past 6-9 months, I've been noticing the same virus, if you will, infecting reddit. The users became more and more meme obsessed, less interested in reading stuff they don't know and more interested in repeating what they already know. I finally looked at the front page the other day and realized there wasn't one article that I viewed had any intellectual value. Yes, I know if I want something specific I can go to individual subreddits, but even most of those has been infected to the point where some users are creating their own academic hideaways on reddit in order to preserve the original reddit intellectualism that once strived (e.g. /r/depthhub).
This is not something reddit can fix, and I fear that reddit will meet the same fate that digg has recently met. Both digg and reddit gained users at a steady pace, then skyrocketed in users and plummeted in intellectual value. On both sites users complained about how the site had changed but no one listened or cared. Eventually, as all the intellectually curious users left, the users that remained realized they are no better than 4chan and began looking for a new home as well. I believe this is an inevitable cycle for all social news websites. I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years I am fleeing Hacker News for the same reason.
I'd love to hear what some of the reddit admins think about how reddit has changed over the years, seeing as you all have had a better perspective than anyone else on reddit's evolution.
Good luck monetizing reddit, I will most likely donate some to show my appreciation for all reddit has provided me for the last couple of years.
I have to agree with you about the general reddit.com, but some of the subreddits are still good or even great.
However I doubt HN will follow, because unlike digg, slashdot and reddit, PG has shown no interest in gaining traffic at the expense of quality (indeed, he has called for the front page to be splashed with Erlang links, precisely so as to get those who wouldn't fit with the site to go elsewhere).
It depends, the tipping point is when currently undesirable behaviour gets rewarded, rather than downvoted as it currently does. In general I still feel hacker news as a community gets it right in which content and submissions are voted up and which down.
Great point. The tipping point for me on Slashdot was when insightful comments would get modded "overrated" just because they didn't agree with whatever pro/anti/MS/Linux/Apple/Democrat/Republican bias the moderators have. When the site gets so overrun by "average" users (whoever that is) with mod points that they can completely bury good comments and outright inaccurate comments get +5.
HN seems to be very good about accurate moderation. If the site ever reached the popularity of Reddit I think it would change.
Above here, I said that I would pay you $5 a month, and I would...but the only reason for that is that you I've talked to you on here (hacker news) before. To me the people runnign reddit are real. To me, you're a friend and I'm throwing $5 into the can that is duct-taped to your kegerator because you let me drink it for free...
...but for most people? What does reddit offer me that I can't get elsewhere? Honestly, a lot of the submissions have gone completely to shit. /r/pics? /r/askreddit? /r/iama? I'm not saying that it is your fault, but there isn't, at least to me, any value there.
Granted, and I'm sure you could look in your logs to see how much I visit your site (it's a lot), but if it went away...would I be sad? Uhhh...maybe a little bit, but not really. Personally, beyond having talked to you here, I don't feel much of a connection to you guys, and I don't feel much of a connection to the community.
Again, I'm not saying that this is exactly your guys' fault, just that it has happened.
One service that I do pay for is usenet, even though I almost never use it (my provider gives me 10 gigs a month and I think I have about a half a terrabye of available transfer hat has just rolled over for the last 5 years or so.) I pay for it because it makes me happy to see what the people at my provider (easynews) are doing. The reason that I signed up to begin with is because I saw them as a mirror on sourceforge. To me, although this is probably completely incorrect, they're fighting the good fight, and I want to support that.
But what are you guys doing to make me voluntarily buy you a beer every month? Reddit doesn't give me anything that I can't get from here, or fark, or slashdot, or my own website. Again, I'll pay you guys $5, but I'm the exception.
To me, you have to ask yourself what you guys have done to make yourselves stand out. If the donation is strictly voluntary, what motivation do I have to give it.
I'll tell you that one reason I am a totalfarker is that Drew Curtis seems like a real guy to me. Other than you, I have no idea who is behind reddit (spez and kn0thing, but I haven't talked to them in a long while).
Again, please don't misunderstand what I'm saying. I love you guys, I'm addicted to your site, I love it...but am I the norm?
>What? /r/iama is one of the best things that happened to reddit. Sure, most of the submissions are shit, but some are golden.
Well, and there's the problem. The SNR on most of the larger subreddits has gotten absolutely terrible lately. I went through a couple of weeks ago and unsubbed from most of the larger reddits and nearly all the self-post only reddits because I simply don't have the time or inclination to dig through 100 garbage headlines for the one golden post.
>The community. Most of the value is in the comments.
The "community" on reddit is incredibly forced in nature. It's almost entirely based around memes that have been coopted from elsewhere and feel-good circle jerking.
Oh, and let's not forget when the community decides to rage about something, jumps to conclusions, and often as not ends up being completely wrong about it, but only after a significant portion of the users have taken to harassing or otherwise disrupting some innocent person's life.
There's still value to be had on reddit, I just increasingly feel like it's being pushed out more and more to the smaller subreddits.
Actually, I feel just the same way about HN. You have to spend a lot of time on HN to follow the development of conversations and have to get in early to accumulate karma. I'm happy with HN as a somewhat glorified newsfeed with interesting topical commentary from coders but as a place to actually engage with people the pace is too fast (i.e. like a newsfeed) and the subject matter too limited in scope, at least given my interests.
most sites can pull that off, almost every forum has the subscription model where all you get is some icon and different color username.
actually I think for reddit it'd be a little harder for comparison...because with those forums, the people know they are supporting small time folks...with reddit, they'd be asking people to donate money to a for profit billion dollar corporation.
This has the same feeling as another Conde Nast owned site: ArsTechnica. They've had a subscription option for a while, and it seems to work well for them.
Regardless of what the Reddit admins or Conde Nast are doing right or wrong to monetize their site, I think it's simply a matter of assessing the value of the information Reddit has exposed me to -- not just via the links but also the user comments. That aggregate value I've derived from their service over the past four years is still far more than what I just donated. (arguably it was more valuable a few years ago when there were fewer animated gifs linked on the homepage)
But that begs the question: if I'm paying reddit, why am I not giving back to the content authors that reddit linked to?
> But that begs the question: if I'm paying reddit, why am I not giving back to the content authors that reddit linked to?
Hopefully when you visit their sites, you are involving yourself in whatever their method of monitization is. Subscriptions, viewing ads, whatever it is.
Nice game. I logged in to play it a bit. I'd love to hear how the game is doing for you (e.g. paying for itself, ramen profitable, ferrari profitable). I'm actually in the middle of developing a browser based "MMO" myself right now. (Nothing deployed yet.)
I worked on Forumwarz for about 3.5 years full time, although my salary was far from glamorous. I'd say I was eating a lot better than ramen though :)
It was amazing experience that I wouldn't trade for anything, and I met so many amazing people and learned a lot, but eventually I realized that earning half of what I was capable of earning as a developer wasn't a good idea in the long term.
I now maintain the site on a part time basis along with a half dozen volunteers. The site still pays its operating costs but there isn't too much left over.
My goal is to run the site as long as possible, which is a lot more affordable now that it isn't doing 40M pageviews a month.
They don't actually have merchandise that generates a profit. All of their merchandise is done through breadpig, where 100% of the profits go to a charity.
Sorry for the confusion here, but reddit's merch is produced by and for reddit's profit -- just sold via the same xkcd store as breadpig. I did run both (before leaving reddit) and only the profits of breadpig merch is donated.
Oh, interesting. Thanks for clearing that up. I think that could be made slightly clearer on the website, though as far as I'm concerned, supporting Reddit or supporting charities are both win situations, so it doesn't matter all that much.
I think they are generating revenue, just not enough for Conde Nast to increase their budget. This seems like a way for them to get extra money that they can personally use toward the site.
> Yikes. What else could reddit offer for subscribers other than a png?
Isn't their code base open source? More money may mean less time spent fixing slowdowns and more time spent on the core code. If you're using their code for something of your own that could be one motivating factor.
Every company/product with a strong community and few employees that I've seen try this has worked massively well.
http://unknownworlds.com/ is a great example. When it was still just a halflife mod, and the creator wanted to work on it full time while bootstrapping the company, he asked for donations to get a special icon in game and playtesting access. There was an incredible outpouring of support and it kept them in the green.
Now, to fund the stand-alone sequel, they are taking preorders far in advance to help the development, with an option to pay $20 extra for the game to get special black armor in-game and their eternal gratitude. Almost all of the preorders opted to pay extra, mostly out of thanks for the years they spent playing the first game for free.
I can definitely see it working in "help the little guy" situations, but I'm much less skeptical that people will open their wallets when the little guy is backed by a mega-corporation.
Good to see a fellow NS player! I've also gone for the "special edition" preorder - knowing full well that there's a non-negligible chance that the studio may well fold before they ever ship a product.
Sometimes the worth of something, and the spirit of those pursuing it, is worth reward/support in and of itself.
I don't know, I think paying money for nothing in return to a big corporation is a little bit insane, actually. $5, in the right hands, would go a long ways in Africa or various other places in the world where people have real, urgent needs. Or if that's not your thing, there are all kinds of real charities out there. Hell, if you want, you can send the money my way and I'll put it in my daughter's college education/future fund. She's even cuter than the reddit alien and doesn't have such extremist political views ("pacifiers for all!" is probably the most controversial).
Joking aside, I think there are a lot of people in Africa, Haiti and, sadly, many other places in the world, who would get a lot more out of a few dollars than my daughter, who will hopefully never experience anything like the sort of privation many people see every day there.
ah yeah good ol' "but Africa" reasoning. You can apply that logic to almost everything. Sorry but why don't you return your freshly bought iPhone and donate the money to charity's? And do you really need a car, can't you ride your bike? Do we really need Reddit if we could buy food in Africa instead?
Maybe that's a little harsh, but we spend money EVERY friggn day on things that could be invested in Africas problems. Making this point leads to nowhere and Africa's problems are far more complex anyway. There's defiantly nothing wrong in donating a few bucks to Reddit.
I think there was a little miscommunication there.
DavidW wrote
> [My daughter] doesn't have such extremist political views ("pacifiers for all!" is probably the most controversial).
I'm pretty sure he was talking about one of those false nipple things that you stick into a baby's mouth in order to soothe it, e.g.: http://www.google.com/images?q=pacifier
I think I've heard this called a "dummy" in UK-English, and I often hear them referred to by various brand names.
I don't think DavidW was trying to make a political comment, he was just making a little joke about his infant daughter, or at least I assume so.
You know, maybe the most militant thing most Redditors ever do is posting commenting online. If you're a pacifist (which is commendable imho) why write so aggressively?
No. There's a difference: I believe very strongly in paying for goods or services received. I don't believe, however, in corporate charity, which is kind of what this is right now. They don't even turn off the advertisements, which is (ought to be?) about the easiest thing in the world to do for someone paying for "premium service".
If they offered a real premium service, I wouldn't make that argument. For instance, no one, least of all myself, complains about lwn.net being a for-pay service, despite their primary market being a bunch of open source guys.
Also, I don't have an iPhone, and do ride my bike a lot, thanks: no need for the hostility.
Reddit exists in a society where US dollars can relatively easily translate into better performance and service for a web site. The reason Africa and Haiti are poor isn't because they lack US dollars, but because they lack the basic social and political infrastructure that allows for currency to be effective (or to reliably end up in the right hands).
Ok, but your $5 aren't going to make the difference, and are a donation, rather than a payment for some particular service, so the optimal individual strategy is to free ride, no? At that point, why donate to Conde Naste rather than some charity.
I'm sure someone like Hernando de Soto has the sort of charity that works on things like political infrustracture.
They say:
"The big problem is that we spend most of our time just keeping the site up and don't have time to focus on these ideas, and Conde is unwilling to invest."
Sorry, but I'm not picking up Conde's slack without anything in return.
My initial reaction was to agree with you, and certainly you have a good point about it possibly being more ethical to give money you don't need to charities.
But at the same time, Reddit is much closer to home for redditors. If I spend 30-60 minutes a day on Reddit, and like it, it has a very measurable impact on my life. It is in my own interest to keep it running. Whether it is a large corporation or not is beside the point. And by donating, I can become a "part" of the site, I can invest in its future (including upcoming premium features, if all goes well). In some sense, donating to Reddit is extremely capitalistic.
Contrast with charity, which is non-capitalistic and much "better" in the sense of ultimate moral good, but where I'm never likely to see my $5 again or even hear how it was used.
Unfortunately there is a basic economics lesson here: Value is in the eyes of the consumer.
The fact of the matter is that people do in fact value giving $5 to a giant corporation for leisure activities more than they do giving that same exact $5 to some person in need in Africa.
(That isn't to suggest they aren't giving a different $5 to Africa, just that they are rich enough to do both.)
They have a userbase which is ridiculously hard to monetize (IMHO). I'd bet the % of adblock users on Reddit is way higher than the average. The Reddit crowd aren't your average mainstream user. It's a particular crowd (liberal anti-capitalism pro-cannabis etc etc) [Again, just my opinion]
Also they really have very few adverts at all on the site, and those that are there, are tucked away not very noticable.
Say you get an eCPM of $0.05 or something (A guess for that sort of site so I may be way off)... That'd work out to $14k/month in ad revenue for 280m pageviews.
That's only for people who visit your site, though, people from places like /r/programming. Let me tell you, there are divides between those who are savvy enough to understand places like /r/programming and those who aren't. I'd estimate reddit's overall adblock usage at being just the same as the rest of the news aggregation sites.
If Reddit immediately offered a subscription service and changed nothing else about their site ... I probably wouldn't subscribe at any price. Reddit is a bit of an occasional guilty pleasure for me, and if it went away, I would write that off as one less distraction. I'm aware that Redditors on the whole have accomplished some pretty great things in their own right, so something like that ought to exist, but I just couldn't justify the cost to me.
BUT! If Reddit required a paid subscription in order to post a comment or story, I would actually be more motivated to spend money on that. It would dramatically change the nature of the site, into one that I think would be more attractive -- to me.
That's just me though, and I'm not a very good example of any kind of business model. ;-) (Nor do I think Reddit actually should do this -- it would be a bad business move.)
I think the ad blocker slogan is unofficially 'I'm an idiot who thinks that web sites and content appears magically without the creators requiring or deserving ad revenue for their work'
They should integrate their ad platform with their static image platform - ie, all logos, thumbnails, and ads are served from the same dir on the same host, perhaps with similar filenames.
Adblock would still work, but ad-rippers be reduced to a text only site.
I am not so sure about that - Reddit is one of the only sites that I turned adblock of on - their ads were too interesting and too funny to hide, which is an amazing accomplishment.
And Reddit never did try very hard to moneytize their site, obvious things like self-serve ads that can be specialized on a subreddit (which means that you can target /r/haskell with job ads - imagine how many adds you can get for the price of one recruiter), the ability to pay to have ads turned of, merch that isn't to benefit a charity, etc.
Turning adblock off doesn't necessarily mean anything. The fact you install adblock at all, means you're not a good demographic in terms of advertising - even if you turn adblock off.
if your audience is hard to monetize, then you go for CPM advertising. That way you get big name brands that want to raise awareness about their products rather than convert users to buy a widget.
This way they'd get more or less guaranteed $3-4 CPM...the fact that reddit has 4 engineers and 0 sales people goes to show that they aren't even trying to monetize the site.
wouldn't even have to do that, right now their ads suck...they are either "hey pay us $20-$30 to advertise on reddit", thanks for not using adblock, buying some reddit schwag, yay reddit, and once in a while you see Amazon or some anime shows ads.
that's it...why can't they go to Honda and get them to pay them money to promote buying a Civic? or Coca Cola? etc etc/
I don't use AdBlock very much, but I must admit that the "thanks for not using adblock" message made me to promise myself that I'll never use AdBlock on reddit.
It sounds like they are profiting. They just aren't having high enough profits that Conde Nast is willing to cut into said profits to either spend more on servers to speed it up or hire another engineer.
companies invest in their business units and let them run at an operating loss for long term viability all the time. I call bullshit. The reddit guys need to do a better job selling their plans to their bosses.
Conde Nast wants a return on their investment (rumored at $65m). So tiny and flat profits are going to be unacceptable to them.
Probably the situation is this: Advertising isn't very lucrative on Reddit, so Nast has told Reddit management that they must come up with some plan to steepen the profit curve, or they're toast.
I can't remember who I'm quoting here, but it comes from someone in the Voluntary Simplicity movement and it really struck a chord with me:
>With your money you get to chose what exists in the world.
It's one of the the last truly democratic forms of voting. In some ways, consumerism is an unriggable election, with the market deciding (for better or worse - sometimes worse) what is allowed to thrive and what dies.
A few people have expressed the opinion that because Reddit is owned by a large corporation, that asking for donations is unjustified. The way I see it, they're creating value, and have a right to ask for payment for that. In exchange for your dollars, you get to see a great community continue existing in the world.
Yes it is true, they are more expensive than others, and if I were starting a new company I might not use them from the start, but they offer us one thing that no one else seems to be able to handle -- the ability to spin up a lot of heavy iron quickly to absorb sudden changes in traffic.
It is simply that EC2 offers us the best bang for the buck for our requirements (one of the main ones being able to spin up a lot of iron very quickly).
May I ask why you don't use another cheaper provider for fixed base load and reserve EC2 for peak load capacity? Is it that the overhead of running on two different providers not worth the money you'd save? Or is this something you've considered doing but haven't had the time to implement yet?
> Is it that the overhead of running on two different providers not worth the money you'd save? Or is this something you've considered doing but haven't had the time to implement yet?
Pretty much yes to both of these. With so few of us, the overhead of running it and moving to it just doesn't make sense at this time.
Actually, it isn't so much the traffic. It's when something like Cassandra suddenly stops working correctly and we need to take emergency action to keep the site up by, for example, doubling our memcached pool temporarily.
None of the VPS's can give us that many nodes that quickly.
Also, bandwidth is by far our lowest cost. It is less than 5% of our total bill.
with only four engineers, this is what I'd focus on, personally. hardware is not as hard or expensive to deal with as people seem to think, especially as they already have a SysAdmin.
To be blunt (we are talking Reddit..) Conde Nast were chumps when they allowed Chris Anderson, high on his own supply, convince them to buy Reddit for its supposed "Long Tail News" value.
Now they're chumps for not putting a grown up in charge of converting 280 million page views/month and a dedicated community to enough money to support 4 engineers and a bunch of servers.
The comparison to Gruber etc is misleading, since Gruber never got bought by a major company. This is more like 30 Rock asking you to donate to NBC.
> Conde Nast were chumps when they allowed Chris Anderson, high on his own supply, convince them to buy Reddit for its supposed "Long Tail News" value.
That's not how it happened.
> Now they're chumps for not putting a grown up in charge
I like to think of myself as a grown up.
> converting 280 million page views/month and a dedicated community to enough money to support 4 engineers and a bunch of servers.
This is the crux of the problem. Marketing and ad sales is out of our direct control and has been lacking, so we've had to resort to other options. Self serve advertising last year was one of them, and it has done us well. This is more extreme for sure, but our plan is to eventually go towards the optional subscription model (like Ars Technica or Fark).
By "grown up" I just mean someone experienced with running the business side. I wouldn't call myself "a grown up" either in that sense, having never done that.
> Marketing and ad sales is out of our direct control and has been lacking
Sorry to hear that. Seems like a common story for startups. I think you guys could do well with a paid model like Metafilter's.
Unless you have some inside information, what on earth makes you think that Conde Nast is to entirely to blame?
The people over at reddit have made two thing clear: that Conde Nast won't increase their budget unless they increase their revenue. And that their current budget is not enough for them to run reddit the way they would like.
I'm certainly not defending Conde Nast, nor will I blindly defend reddit. And I certainly don't expect any company to run a site the size of reddit out of charity.
I will donate, as I've been a long time reddit user who enjoys the site (though somewhat less as time goes on).
It's bizarre in the sense that it's a rare problem. I can approach any of a million US sites, give them some money, and put an ad on their site. I can head over to http://buysellads.com/ and do that right now.
Being subjected to foreign laws can't be a huge concern, surely. Contracts for advertising (and, heck, almost any online service) specify the legal jurisdiction that applies to the transaction. If I live in Kazakhstan, buy some ads on a US site, there's not much I can do if I agreed to a US-based contract whether Reddit breaks Kazakhstani law or not.
The problem is that we aren't just selling ad space. We are running what might be considered an "auction" in some jurisdictions (it isn't in the United States), and that is what the lawyers fear. They want to make sure we won't get dinged for running an illegal auction.
Interesting. I hadn't seen that explanation before. Upboated :-) Now I just hope that the UK is one of those English speaking jurisdictions or I'll be resorting to the tried and tested "pay someone in the US to run the ad for me" technique.
While you're at it, add a 'flag' button to self serving ads. I've seen a couple of ads with comments disabled and no flag, yet when I clicked on them (only a few though) Chrome reported malicious content.
I'm not sure what the problems are, and I agree with others' sentiment that they need to focus on business and advertising. Still, as someone who in the last few years has bought into the Rails explanation of scaling (sure, ruby is slow, but you can scale horizontally with more servers after you're sold and have bajillions to spend), I wonder if this is a bad sign for startups using dynamic languages.
I've played around with www.playframework.org, and in my tests it was a LOT faster than ruby, while offering many of the same benefits as Rails. I know Reddit is written in Python with Pylons, but I wonder if all those CPU cycles they sacrificed by using Python instead of Java wouldn't come in handy now?
Yeah, the trick about that is that servers aren't really as cheap as everyone says. Also, with horizontal scaling you spend more money elsewhere: on stuff the programmers usually don't know shit about, like big-iron loadbalancers, and on systems administration. So when someone says "hardware is cheap, programmers are expensive" be aware that they are forgetting about systems administrators who are often more expensive than programmers.
I was recently involved with a project where we were able to reduce our server costs by an order of magnitude by switching from ruby to java.
Yeah, what he said... sort of.
First we tried just smushing everything into JRuby, but that was a mess. We then split the app into a bunch of services, instead of one monolithic rails beast. Each new service is a simple java app. It was a gradual process, taking about 7 months.
FYI, we tried to buy a self serve Reddit ad a month ago but it wouldn't accept any of our cards. Tried to contact you guys but never heard anything back. No hard feelings, we just went with other advertising.
But if this happens more then incidentally then you guys could easily be missing out on multiple 1k/month advertising deals by not offering a way to contact someone on the team.
Do what incredibly successful SomethingAwful does: it's pretty much free to browse and read (but saturated with ads) or you can pay $10 for life, and rid yourself of most ads and post content.
It removes 99% of the shitheads and creates a great community. You can also buy upgrades like an avatar, no-ads, a custom title, personal messages, etc.
SA also wields the banhammer with wild abandon. For people who don't toe the line, the $10 turns into a subscription. The army of mods needed to keep the revolving door going is large, but I think they like their jobs.
Unfortunately the last several years of SA have revealed that this model doesn't really scale either, at least with regards to maintaining a vibrant community and avoiding the Digg effect. I think they should have started raising the rates about 2004.
What I would do...
Tier 1: $36 a year to get rid of ads and get a silver badge
Tier 2: $72 a year to get rid of ads and get a gold badge and be mentioned on a "featured supporters" page
Tier 3: $144 a year to get all of the above (except make it a platinum badge) and become a "platinum-supporter," which would entitle you to discounts to Conde Naste events, pulications, etc. Conde Naste owns Wired, the New Yorker, etc, so the discounts could be pretty cool with a bit of creativity.
I don't want to kick someone when they are down, but this just stood out to me:
And reddit's revenue isn't great. The good news is, our traffic continues to grow by leaps and bounds.
Talk about doing it wrong.
When you have growth but no revenue, it's probably because you aren't asking your users to pay. That should be every website's first option - ask people to pay for the service they receive.
Paying users are great, un-paying users are a liability.
Paying users aren't the only way. Reddit could have started at the outset with adverts. They could have made that decision early on that they were going to generate revenue. But they didn't - which is why Reddit has attracted the sort of demographic that don't click on ads.
A very good point -- the characteristics of a website's community is determined usually well before, and only rarely after, its point of big growth. Reddit definitely ended up with, um, less-monetizable DNA, and didn't want to "sell out," so that characteristic never changed.
It's also a good illustration of what Joe Kraus said in his brilliant Startup School speech -- when you put your product into beta, put your business model into beta at the same time.
They could at least make their ad display scripts deposit tokens for the user via async requests, and throttle users who run out of them. It's a better way of thanking me for not running AdBlock than a PNG of the alien giving me the thumbs up.
1. I'll concede the network effect, but if you are having trouble supporting - for example - 10,000 users with a .5% conversion rate, 100,000 with that same conversion rate isn't going to help you. You need to change the ratio, not just grow.
2. You'll need to find me some stats that back up the point that there is a relationship between the length of time a user is on a site and their commitment to purchase. If this is true, all websites should see increased per capita conversion rates over time. I don't think this is the case, but please prove me wrong.
Reddit has long-running jokes mocking the idea of paying for websites. The backlash to being asked to pay for anything on the internet would be massive. Strange, because you'd think a community of programmers would appreciate what the engineers do.
free is fine; the problem is that you can't make something with a high marginal cost and then give it away for free... This is why I think cheap infrastructure is so important.
Is there any actual synergy at all with the rest of Conde Nast? Would it make sense for Reddit to work with some P.E. people to buy themselves out, and make a venture investment in improving the site?
Invest in the 280M uniques, not in the guys.
Put the "Francis M. H. White of Monetization" in as CEO, let the founders be involved in other roles (they're great at building a community and at "ghetto" engineering).
That it is weak sauce now just means you could buy it cheaper. If I had $5-10mm (+100% debt) sitting around and nothing better to do with my life for 2-4 years, I'd be seriously tempted to make an offer to Conde Nast.
It will have to be many pieces not just a subscription...having to be careful though for the community, so create more...
- reddit game site with reddit comments and upvoting integrated into the site like kongregate, game sites can pull in some better revenue (indie game competitions, stats, leaderboards etc).
- reddit book or movie club where you take the revenue of the amazon lead or other store leads.
- make money off the porn communities, tier the submission process (lots of great companies get some funding from porn and noone will complain here).
- prominent donation link or pay it forward like flattr.
- deals for sponsorship such as takeovers on subreddits for movies, games, etc.
- deals for reddit flash mobs for buying a product or service at once or with code (queue people ready to buy a product, then find a retailer ready to give 10% off for redditors - could work with book/movie clubs above and digital goods like steam games).
- ...
If you can relate everything back to your core feature (awesome community) then it may just work.
Can any savings be had by committing to a data center instead of paying the amazon hosting rates? I fear if they're at yet another crunch point, the next one will be too much. Granted the pressure to "do more with less" is always there, but something has to give.
We actually moved from a datacenter to EC2. The problem is we all live in the Bay Area, where data centers cost a lot of money. We can't afford to hire a hand on person in a cheap place, so it turns out EC2 (and other cloud solutions) are just cheaper.
Also, one thing that is nice with EC2 is that we can spin up a lot of big iron when we need to absorb new kinds of traffic. I can't do that in my own datacenter.
With the number of page views you all are getting, why don't you bring on a developer on a commission basis to really focus on driving revenue. I'm sure you can find an ambition, business minded developer that you could give a percentage of the increase in revenue to, who would be willing to work for free to get things going. There is definitely money being left on the table, and structuring it in this way could allow you to avoid getting shot down by the people in charge, while bringing in more people, and increasing the revenue, which will ultimately allow you all to increase the operating budget.
I'd definitely be interested in something like this, and I'm sure many other people would be too.
Here's a silly/naive suggestion from someone who only casually visits reddit (read: not often to know exactly what is causing the downtime): why not make the source code behind the more problematic functions available and let us make suggestions? If not source code, then detailed descriptions?
I'd be interested in helping optimize your pain points, as I'm sure many here and on reddit are. Yes, you'll get quite a ton of trash from people who have no clue by doing this, but maybe you'll get some smart pointers in a way that doesn't require you to get a new engineer spun up in six months (which, IMHO, seems far too long for a web product)
What value, if any, can information from Reddit be used by Conde Nast to drive their larger business (i.e. selling ads)?
Not knowing anything about the deal (but knowing a bit about Conde's general disdain for the web) I'm still surprised that your biggest problem is an ad-sales framework.
At the same time, I always assumed that Reddit was one of the most future-forward components in Conde's portfolio, and that it could provide as much if not more intelligence value to its owners than it could via direct revenue.
This are totally off the cuff responses. I could easily be wrong about everything.
Move to AppEngine. Seriously. I know the pain these guys are going thro sys-admin-ing the system.
The memcache clears out, The cassandra's fail, the fault reporting system breaks. The new twitter fail whale. Let the pros do the sys admin thing.
Like Ted Zuiba says it, it not that they are not intelligent, the kind of problems that occur at large scales, they just don't have enough experience to know, anticipate and have preventive measures in place.
They should really talk to Google, to move their data on to the Bigtable and work on adding features.
To be honest Reddit isn't that techie anymore, reddit's demographics have shifted to teenage and young adult males and girls who are "geeks". Not only that but the default reddits are becoming a cesspool like Digg. Essentially the community had so much Digg hate in the beginning but at least Kevin Rose kept his site running while the demographics shifted.
Reddit is very loyal to its userbase, but isn't moderating them too much. Thus, it is becoming hard to market toward them because there isn't an easy in for someone offering products. Either they need to shape their audience more, or figure out the right types of products (these may not even exist yet, but I'm sure there are plenty of things redditors want that don't yet exist) I would also look at what people are giving for arbitrary day as an idea for advertisers.
Reddit I will pay you whatever it takes to keep those nasty adds off of your website. Please do not sell our attention to people who do not deserve it.
Why not create a sub-community for subscribers only? I mean, normal users see subscriber and normal users posts but subscribers optionally only see other subscribers. Maybe this would create a tighter knit, higher quality group. As beaten as this dead horse is, we all know Reddit is infected with memes and nonsense galore, that's why many of use have graduated to HN.
make expenses completely transparent (+hosting +salaries -advertising). prominently display this per-month quota as some kind of health-bar, and next to that a payment button. if the health-bar drops below x%, the rest of the site disappears. there is no profit in this model. let the users finance their own addiction.
I'd love to see the "health-bar" implemented - reddit is absurdly secretive about what is going wrong behind the scenes and seemingly unwilling to allow users to help. The site has suffered for lack of transparency and community management.
Brilliant tactic encouraging members to set their own donation amount. I imagine Reddit will receive significantly more donations and overall totals than had they set donation structure.
A user's willingness to pay is going to be based either off of charity (a la NPR) or as an exchange for a service/good. You can't have both, simply due to human nature.
You don't know reddit community. They will gladly pay monthly fee (which is not forced) just to get a gold icon on their "Trophy case". Its not because Reddit users has more expendable expenses compare to other online communities its because reddit community is more "involved" than other online community I have ever seen.
Just compare reddit charity to Haiti fund and Digg doing the same thing.
They both promoted it, they both blogged it in their official company blog. Kevin rose personally tweeted it to his 1million+ followers. And they got 4k measly dollars and Reddit got $185k, albeit reddit started few weeks sooner, but still....
I am not trying to make a reddit > digg derpity derpity derp argument, I am just saying that people greatly underestimate the power of "involved" community. Not a community by page views numbers ala Digg.
Reddit is the only online community I've ever been in where I've met and befriended fellow members in real life; I've been online for a fair while.
There's a connectedness there that simply does not exist for most online communities. Hell, I go to a weekly board games and hang-out night with fellow redditors in the area - no other internet community has ever compelled me to do that before.
I'm not sure you read my comment. I'm not saying that charity requests don't work. I'm saying that you can't (effectively) mix charity and selling services.
Sure you can. I routinely pay more for things when I know that the proceeds are going to a good cause. The way I look at it is that it's both a purchase and a donation.
Say I see a cool T-shirt that some charity is selling for $25. That's pretty steep for a T-shirt. I'd probably only pay around $15 for a T-shirt normally. But if I like the shirt and like the charity, I might buy it anyway. I view that as a $15 purchase and a $10 donation.
"Our four engineers are working full time just to keep things going. Perhaps we're doing it wrong: there might be ways to optimize our code, or technologies that could allow us to work more efficiently, but we're too busy to investigate these things, or to migrate to the ones that look promising. It becomes a vicious cycle."
If Reddit had not abandoned Lisp for Python, could the team have dodged this vicious cycle?
Today you can choose between Clozure lisp or Clojure, both of which runs the same on the different platforms and both of which are free.
Back then, the only way they could have pulled it of would be to use something like Lispworks or Franz lisp, both of which are super nice technologies that would be awesome to work with but they are also extreemly expensive (and I have no idea how they scale).
Let me pay $10, and all I ask for in return is site stability and maybe a sweet icon next to my name when I comment. Honestly I bet you could get 100k subscribers within a week. People are hopelessly addicted to these aggregation services, and if subscribing gives us the self assurance that their be around for us to continue enjoying them the fee is worth it. I don't expect you to remove the sponsored ads either (actually i'd be a bit disappointed if you did... its nice seeing ads for small businesses I haven't heard about)
A few downsides, once you start charging me I'm going to gain some expectations. Downtime is going to be harder to excuse then it was before is just one example.
> once you start charging me I'm going to gain some expectations. Downtime is going to be harder to excuse then it was before is just one example.
One of the main reasons we hesitated so long. We didn't want to let down the community, especially those that paid.
As always, we will do our best to keep the site up, and hopefully this new income will make it so we can afford the redundant servers we need to do a better job at it.
Each time we've had a new programmer come on board, it takes about 6 months for them to become familiar enough with the code to make a solid contribution. In the mean time, it actually slows us down a bit.
That was the main reason we didn't seek programming interns this summer -- it's a great thought, but would probably take too long to ramp them up.
First of all, thanks for your hard work on reddit. I'm myself quite addicted to some interesting subreddits for about 6 months.
I would like to answer on your issue with the 6 months problem that interns 'would have' if you pick one. If I'm right, you released a virtual machine with reddit installed, last month, on a blog post. I see no reason for _any_ intern for not being able to contribute to reddit from day 1.
Seriously, /r/programming and /r/coding are great, and I'm 110% sure you can find an intern which would know perfectly how reddit works (code related) and who would be very kind to help out.
This virtual machine already setup was a great idea, why not using it to your own goal ?
Could you filter for interns with more experience? i.e. ones that have done a couple of internships before at Microsoft, Google, etc. Or since reddit is mostly open source, hire interns that are already familiar with the code base? Or hire interns that can work for 6-9 months rather than 12 weeks?
I will happily contribute some of my time each month to help you acquire targeted advertisers. I think you would find that in each country / subreddit the very community you foster will be more than willing to help you.
E-Mail is on my profile if you want to get in contact.
This is essentially how Shacknews worked since '99. People who subscribed got a lightning bold next to the name and got uncapped downloads on fileshack. This worked out very well for them.
Reddit is user generated content. Without the users, who are the readers and contributers, Reddit wouldn't even exist. And yet they want subscription fees from the very users who carry the website?
Reddit have ads plastered prominently on the site, Reddit TV, a 99 cent app, I assume merch (correct me if I'm wrong), free user generated content from a massive hardcore following, and millions of pageviews a day (too lazy to look up the exact number) - and yet they still can't make a go of it?
If so, that does not bode well for the rest of us.
Here are the things they can do: 1. Place more ads. I don't buy the notion that many reddit users run ad-blockers. Even half of them do, you still get 140M/month page views. 2. Get Google AdSense, to place content-related ads. 3. Sponsorship. Have companies to sponsor some subreddits and add companies promotion and events. 4. Paid submission, clearly marked so. Company ad and product/service announcement can go there. E.g. all the webhosting promotion deals going on now. 5. Create some deal/coupon/onsales subreddits. Have companies feed them and pay for them. Rather than just having user-generated content, have companies generated content as well, and get paid for them. 6. CPA revenue sharing. Give redditers some percentage of discount when they go to a merchant's site to purchase something from a reddit link. Reddit takes a cut. It's a win-win-win setup, merchant sells a product minus the marketing cost which becomes the redditers' discount and reddit's share.
There are so many ways to skin this cat. They are sitting on a good problem to have. Why are they fumbling on this?