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Reddit needs help

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Re: Reddit needs help

#91

Post by keysersosa »

nir wrote: post #50
jamesshamenski wrote: post #7

Conde Nast looks like a bunch of chumps right now. I doubt Mike Raldi will last longer than a year if he has to raise funds in this way.

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,…

> 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).

Re: Reddit needs help

#92

Post by nir »

zyb09 wrote: post #58
davidw wrote: post #32

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/…

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.…

>(also pacifism is neither extreme nor wrong)

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?

Re: Reddit needs help

#93

Post by kn0thing »

Zak wrote: post #25
city41 wrote: post #12

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.

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.

Thanks again for buying that shirt, Zak :)

Re: Reddit needs help

#94

Post by ch00 »

city41 wrote: post #12

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.

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?

Re: Reddit needs help

#95

Post by leftnode »

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.

Re: Reddit needs help

#96

Post by vaksel »

jbooth wrote: post #88
axod wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you put traditional (well paying) ads on Reddit, I think the userbase would revolt scream etc etc.

They'd scream, and there'd be a rash of "this sucks, I'm quitting" diaries and then like 5 people who were going to quit anyways would actually leave. Look at their site, 2 total ads on the main page, one per comment page. They could bump that to 5 per page without breaking a sweat. There's their revenue.

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/

Re: Reddit needs help

#97

Post by nir »

keysersosa wrote: post #91
nir wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> 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 th…

>That's not how it happened.

Granted, you know better than me.

>I like to think of myself as a grown up

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.

Re: Reddit needs help

#98

Post by philwelch »

davidw wrote: post #32

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/…

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).

Re: Reddit needs help

#99

Post by rufugee »

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?

Re: Reddit needs help

#100

Post by msmith »

ww520 wrote: post #86

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…

If you read the whole article, you'll see that they're considering paid subscriptions.
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