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Reddit needs help

blog.reddit.com

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Re: Reddit needs help

#141

Post by codexon »

axod wrote: post #35
vaksel wrote: post #6

280 million page views a month and they aren't breaking even to support 4 engineers? wtf

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…

Last year I measured ~65% of visitors from Reddit had adblock.

http://www.codexon.com/posts/the-percentage-of-people-using-...

Re: Reddit needs help

#142

Post by natep »

blhack wrote: post #29
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 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). Personally, I would pay $5/mo for premium reddit.

Not speaking personally, but I'm sure spammers would LOVE to pay $5/mo to spam.

Re: Reddit needs help

#143

Post by robryan »

zyb09 wrote: post #48
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.

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.

Re: Reddit needs help

#144

Post by drawkbox »

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.

Re: Reddit needs help

#145

Post by greendestiny »

jedberg wrote: post #104
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…

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'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.

Re: Reddit needs help

#146

Post by Locke1689 »

Zak wrote: post #116
jedberg wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I can't really see paying for reddit now. If I may ask, what did we do to lose you?

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 fro…

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.

Re: Reddit needs help

#147

Post by Keyframe »

jedberg wrote: post #110
petercooper wrote: post #38

They could accept advertisers from outside the US without using some bizarre legal argument I've never heard from any other company.

The legal argument isn't that bizarre. :) Our lawyers fear foreign laws and will not deal with them. That being said, we are working on expanding into some of the other English speaking countries.

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.

Re: Reddit needs help

#148

Post by jcnnghm »

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.

Re: Reddit needs help

#149

Post by staunch »

il wrote: post #137
jedberg wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

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.

Re: Reddit needs help

#150

Post by brunoc »

starkfist wrote: post #101
rufugee wrote: post #99

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 a…

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 expensiv…

I'd love to hear more about this ruby -> java transition if you're willing to share.
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