Sad to see them hiring an outside CEO instead of promoting from within. I don't think hired CEOs work so well for products that are still at the stage Reddit is at. They need someone with deep, intimate knowledge of the community and the product. The best source for that in my opinion would be internal.
Reddit is currently a small team of developers, so there's really no "within" to promote from. I don't know them personally, but I somehow doubt any of the developers wants to be CEO.
There might be a really cool cafe on my block, and I might go in there and have lively discussions with intelligent people, and there might be more and more people in that cafe every day, but if the cafe doesn't sell any coffee it goes out of business.
Sure. But to suggest that the site might be dying at the (so far) height of its popularity seems odd, which is why I was asking for clarification. Would you describe Twitter as dying? Or YouTube? Or any other sites that have been infamously unprofitable for years and years before eventually turning it around?
Twitter is well funded and big enough that there would be signs of collapse before it started to die. YouTube is owned by Google and has tons of advertising. I'm not worried about either of them.
Reddit is owned by a publishing company that's lost interest in keeping it around, it's not nearly as big as Twitter or YouTube yet, and it has one of the worst audiences imaginable for monetization. I wouldn't say it's dying per se, but they have to start thinking about how they're going to pay for all those new servers and all that new staff.
Reddit is currently a small team of developers, so there's really no "within" to promote from. I don't know them personally, but I somehow doubt any of the developers wants to be CEO.
Who says developers can't be CEOs? Zuckerberg, Gates, Page, ...
I didn't say they can't. But the guys you mentioned showed clear signs of wanting to lead right from the start. Zuckerberg and Gates in particular started off with big egos, big ambitions and a clear desire to spearhead a technological vision. Again, I don't know the Reddit team, but have you seen any of their developers taking any kind of leadship initiative?
"The sub-reddit system could theoretically segment the audience in interesting ways, but other than r/gaming, there aren't many natural industry fits amongst popular sub-reddits." In my opinion this is only true for a few (admittedly most popular) subreddits like r/funny and r/wtf and everything nsfw . Nearly every subreddit that I read has an industry that fits, r/photography -> photo gear, r/parenting -> baby stuff…
You're not wrong by any means, but it's also a question of scale and purchasing power. There's no doubt that r/parenting is filled with people worth talking to about, say, baby products. But then look at the advertising sales minisite for Babycenter.com[1]; a company like Johnson & Johnson isn't going to bother with r/parenting. Smaller companies might be interested, but small companies don't spend much money on ads.…
> a company like Johnson & Johnson isn't going to bother with r/parenting
This is false. My girlfriend works in social media at a Fortune 100 company. Just a few of their many products are geared toward babies and other things of interest to parents. She attends "mommy blogger" conferences, reaches out to people on Twitter and Facebook, and otherwise works with people who have a substantial audience in order to advertise with them.
Big companies are much more likely than small companies to even have such a role. They are very interested in promoting themselves and increasing their profits in any way possible. There's absolutely no reason they wouldn't be interested in something like r/parenting
The question for reddit isn't whether or not people enjoy it and want to spend time on it, but whether or not the owners can make money selling those people's attention. The traffic to reddit - while admirably large - is relatively unattractive to most advertisers. "Reach" (impressions/eyeballs) are only important insofar as you're talking to someone who might buy what you're selling (see "relevancy"). The sub-reddit…
r/gaming, there aren't many natural industry fits I wonder if then that speaks to interesting business opportunities? There appears then to be a misalignment between traditional industries and what people are actually interested in.
Well, r/trees suggests an interesting business opportunity, but that's illegal. Lots of other subreddits (/r/mensrights, /r/politics, /r/worldnews, /r/atheism) are hotbeds of demagoguery and outrage, which may be good for political fundraising but little else. (It's possible to sell demagoguery and outrage--Rupert Murdoch and Arianna Huffington have taught us that much--but I don't know about selling it people who are already getting it for free.) And then of course, pictures of cats and formulaic jokes are another thing.
Can someone with more business know-how tell me how a company like Condé Nast benefits from making Reddit an incorporated subsidiary? It doesn't sound like all that much is changing, honestly.
Instead of Reddit being a division on the Org. chart of C.N., Reddit Inc. shares are held by C.N. This means that Reddit can take on equity investors to finance operations and operate externally of any organizational influence Conde Nast had (which may not have been much anyways).
Reddit, Inc., will be owned by Advance Publications, which also owns Condé Nast, so it will be a corporate sibling of CN and more independent of it. Advance Publications owns other divisions in addition to CN, including a newspaper division that presumably does not is not influenced very much by the magazine folks:
Sounds like they may be making it more attractive as an aquisition target.
You underestimate the ability of a large media company to squash innovation and morale. They might get outside investment so they can iterate harder/better/faster but Advance wants to hold onto this goldmine. From http://www.betabeat.com/2011/09/06/a-startup-is-reborn-reddi... : Greater independence will mean reddit can go to a new board, which includes reddit OG Alexix Ohanian, who had been serving as an “advisor,”…
Hmm, in that case they seem to be making a reasonable move: remove to some extent the overhead of Conde Nast. If that's the primary motivation, then I am impressed that Conde Nast can recognize it's limitations, and give reddit a chance to grow outside of their oversight. That being said, my impression was that Conde Nast was remarkably hands off.
facebook wasn't You meant it hasn't so far. That's not a dig at Facebook, or a prediction of death, but on the short timescale we're looking at (a few years really) it's much to soon to know whether they've stopped the cycle, or made it slower. And therefore you can extent that to Reddit, the fact that they've gone longer without decline doesn't mean they won't start their decline tomorrow, or the next day.
Sure, but "they might start declining someday" can be said about literally any large web property. It's not something MORE true about Reddit.
But this isn't in the context of simply 'guess the future of the website'.
The context is a hypothesis that this type of site will grow and eventually die down - and assuming that hypothesis, it's too early to say whether Reddit has changed that trend or just changed how long it takes. I'd say that in another 10 years, if it starts to die then, it would have gone long enough to say it changed the trend. But right now, too soon.
Who says developers can't be CEOs? Zuckerberg, Gates, Page, ...
I didn't say they can't. But the guys you mentioned showed clear signs of wanting to lead right from the start. Zuckerberg and Gates in particular started off with big egos, big ambitions and a clear desire to spearhead a technological vision. Again, I don't know the Reddit team, but have you seen any of their developers taking any kind of leadship initiative?
i think they did a pretty good job increasing the monthly page views to 1.6 billion..
In my experience, I've gotten really poor responses from the Reddit admins almost every time. When I say poor I mean 'none'. I don't think it's a function of them being bad or lazy, but being such a small team for such an enormous site. I can't imagine being the sole community manager for such a monster. You have to triage between "will answer tersely" and "will ignore". And unless it's a lawsuit or a fire about to b…
I know what you mean. It must be pretty hard. I tried many times with no luck. Shame really, because @reddit.com could be deployed like really really fast. I guess I'll give it another go perhaps. Maybe use a promoted ad to get their attention (and support Reddit in the process :) )
For the best results, reply to an administrator in a comment thread. I think that has the best response rate.