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Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews

blog.reddit.com

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Re: Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews

#31

Post by bialecki »

danso wrote: post #21

Whatever you think of @reddit's march towards decline...this was my favorite part of the blog post...and something I hope rings with other popular sites: Here’s a list of things we don’t (and won’t) do for traffic: We don't get traffic through ads. We don’t participate in any traffic trading. We don’t email our users (unless they choose to enter an email and then forget their password). We don’t harass users to sign…

Not to take a thing away from Reddit, but there are a lot of bored people out there and they don't know that many great places on the internet. To compound that, mobile devices have created more time when you can be doing something else (i.e. between commercials, on the bus, etc.).

It's not that there aren't a lot of great websites out there, it's just that most people I know only go to 2-5 regularly. Reddit is a great site, but I know a lot of people who go there 30 minutes after they just clicked through 100 links hoping there's something new (and then when they're bored posting about it - http://www.reddit.com/search?q=blue+links). I'm not sure why, but either people can only remember a few websites, other sites suck or they can't be found.

Re: Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews

#32

Post by __alexs »

rudiger wrote: post #30
danso wrote: post #21

Whatever you think of @reddit's march towards decline...this was my favorite part of the blog post...and something I hope rings with other popular sites: Here’s a list of things we don’t (and won’t) do for traffic: We don't get traffic through ads. We don’t participate in any traffic trading. We don’t email our users (unless they choose to enter an email and then forget their password). We don’t harass users to sign…

Regarding the "decline" of Reddit: any site that gets 2 billion monthly page views is going to be wholly different from its incipient form of several years ago. Surely the users of Reddit who pine for its past have many alternatives today.

The alternatives often seem to come in the form of communities splintering. e.g. /r/gaming, /r/gamingnews /r/games, /r/truegaming etc. The expansion and decline in quality (i.e. rage comic spam) is usually followed quite rapidly by new sub-reddits being created and communities forming with stricter areas of moderation.

Re: Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews

#33

Post by jonknee »

nostromo wrote: post #27
jonknee wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LinkedIn's audience/traffic is far more valuable though, so I'm not sure why you added the bit about their market cap. Reddit users by and large are there for entertainment and don't click on ads. LinkedIn's users are there for work and by and large are the ads.

I don't think reddit is really trying so hard to monitize. (And given the nature of their user base, maybe it's the smartest thing to do.) The banner ad unit on the right of reddit is almost never running a real ad. It's always an ad for a subreddit or a pretty picture. That one single spot at $1 cpm at 2b pageviews could net reddit $2mm a month. That's a lot of money to be left on the table.

$1CPM for the whole page (all the spots) would be very tough for a social news site, doubly so for one with porn and triply so for one with porn and reddit's demographic.

To put that in perspective, if Facebook were to get $1CPM they would be bringing in over $1B a month from just advertising. Facebook's revenue is about a third of that and doesn't all come from advertising (Facebook Credits and what not). It's even more bleak considering that Facebook has the ability to target advertising much better than reddit.

They can certainly make a bundle of cash, but it's a tough nut to crack.

Re: Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews

#34

Post by recursive »

kmfrk wrote: post #15
patrickod wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the degradation of community and content is one of the issues that is associated with scale. I personally think reddit has done a much better job at staying off the decline than digg did. I'll be interested to see how things progress as their traffic numbers continue (presumably) to rise.

Is there a consensus about what caused the decline of Digg? I thought it had a lot to do with the redesign that couldn't be reverted, but I don't like to peddle hearsay and assumptions like it's the truth, especially since I never used Digg.

I know they suffered a big drop when it came out that they were manually curating the links on their front page. I don't remember the details, but that's what did it for me.

Re: Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews

#35

Post by Adaptive »

Condé Nast had no idea what they were buying. The best decision they made, one I'm sure that was the result of the Reddit team making the case for it, was relatively hands off mgmt.

I suspect CN still doesn't really know what to do with it other than sit back and not screw it up.

Re: Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews

#36

Post by acgourley »

__alexs wrote: post #32
rudiger wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding the "decline" of Reddit: any site that gets 2 billion monthly page views is going to be wholly different from its incipient form of several years ago. Surely the users of Reddit who pine for its past have many alternatives today.

The alternatives often seem to come in the form of communities splintering. e.g. /r/gaming, /r/gamingnews /r/games, /r/truegaming etc. The expansion and decline in quality (i.e. rage comic spam) is usually followed quite rapidly by new sub-reddits being created and communities forming with stricter areas of moderation.

Still that is a suboptimal divide, and leaves a discovery problem. Someone will solve it and replace reddit in at least some profound ways.

Re: Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews

#38

Post by _delirium »

nostromo wrote: post #27
jonknee wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LinkedIn's audience/traffic is far more valuable though, so I'm not sure why you added the bit about their market cap. Reddit users by and large are there for entertainment and don't click on ads. LinkedIn's users are there for work and by and large are the ads.

I don't think reddit is really trying so hard to monitize. (And given the nature of their user base, maybe it's the smartest thing to do.) The banner ad unit on the right of reddit is almost never running a real ad. It's always an ad for a subreddit or a pretty picture. That one single spot at $1 cpm at 2b pageviews could net reddit $2mm a month. That's a lot of money to be left on the table.

I think being part of Condé Nast makes monetization a bit weird as well. From what they've written in the past, some of the decisions were due to how Condé Nast views things internally, e.g. Reddit Gold was introduced in part just because it gave a "paying subscribers" number that made sense to a traditional media company's executives and reporting methods.

Re: Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews

#39

Post by kayhi »

danso wrote: post #21

Whatever you think of @reddit's march towards decline...this was my favorite part of the blog post...and something I hope rings with other popular sites: Here’s a list of things we don’t (and won’t) do for traffic: We don't get traffic through ads. We don’t participate in any traffic trading. We don’t email our users (unless they choose to enter an email and then forget their password). We don’t harass users to sign…

My concern is that this stand may hurt profitability.

I don't think any of us want harassing or pestering, but have come across companies that it is a pleasure to read their email or invite friends.

Re: Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews

#40

Post by astrodust »

Adaptive wrote: post #35

Condé Nast had no idea what they were buying. The best decision they made, one I'm sure that was the result of the Reddit team making the case for it, was relatively hands off mgmt. I suspect CN still doesn't really know what to do with it other than sit back and not screw it up.

If you don't actively unscrew it up, it will screw itself up.

Reddit is already in steep decline even though page-views are up. It's attracting a different crowd now. They're just one Digg-bar moment away from disaster.

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