131–140 of 258 posts
"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?
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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.
> but I can't really see paying for reddit now. If I may ask, what did we do to lose you?
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.
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 (act…
> 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…
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> but I can't really see paying for reddit now. If I may ask, what did we do to lose you?
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 m…
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…
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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Well how did Metafilter end up with paid membership?
Metafilter finds unique articles, but the comments are terrible. Non-threaded comment sections only work for 4chan.
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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.
That was actually one of the things we already tried. I think in a month we made enough for a cup of coffee.