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Reddit needs help

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Re: Reddit needs help

#181

Post by jolan »

jedberg wrote: post #175
jolan wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious -- why don't you start a new company? It's obvious that your work isn't being respected by your current employers. Does reddit mean a lot to you personally?

> Just curious -- why don't you start a new company? Stay tuned. :) > It's obvious that your work isn't being respected by your current employers. Hmmm, I've never really thought about it that way before. > Does reddit mean a lot to you personally? It does. I've worked for reddit officially for over 3.5 years, and I've been friends with Steve and Alexis for almost 5 years. I've watched reddit grow from a tiny site to…

BTW, do you know Philip Guenther from sendmail? :)

Re: Reddit needs help

#182

Post by megablahblah »

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…

It's because they don't know shit about advertising. Take a look at their "sponsored link" system. It's impossible for an advertiser to predict what impressions or click-throughs they will get for their ad spend.

Re: Reddit needs help

#183

Post by petercooper »

jedberg wrote: post #173
petercooper wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's bizarre in the sense that it's a rare problem. I can approach any of a million US sites, give them some money, and put an ad on their site. I can head over to http://buysellads.com/ and do that right now. Being subjected to foreign laws can't be a huge concern, surely. Contracts for advertising (and, heck, almost any online service) specify the legal jurisdiction that applies to the transaction. If I live in Kaz…

The problem is that we aren't just selling ad space. We are running what might be considered an "auction" in some jurisdictions (it isn't in the United States), and that is what the lawyers fear. They want to make sure we won't get dinged for running an illegal auction.

Interesting. I hadn't seen that explanation before. Upboated :-) Now I just hope that the UK is one of those English speaking jurisdictions or I'll be resorting to the tried and tested "pay someone in the US to run the ad for me" technique.

Re: Reddit needs help

#184

Post by JabavuAdams »

rdl wrote: post #180

Is there any actual synergy at all with the rest of Conde Nast? Would it make sense for Reddit to work with some P.E. people to buy themselves out, and make a venture investment in improving the site?

Why would anyone make a venture investment in some guys who just admitted that they can't think of how to make money on 280M uniques?

Reddit was (perhaps not intentionally) built to flip. Mission accomplished.

Re: Reddit needs help

#185

Post by tomjen3 »

bballbackus wrote: post #132
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?

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…

I have to agree with you about the general reddit.com, but some of the subreddits are still good or even great.

However I doubt HN will follow, because unlike digg, slashdot and reddit, PG has shown no interest in gaining traffic at the expense of quality (indeed, he has called for the front page to be splashed with Erlang links, precisely so as to get those who wouldn't fit with the site to go elsewhere).

Re: Reddit needs help

#186

Post by rdl »

JabavuAdams wrote: post #184
rdl wrote: post #180

Is there any actual synergy at all with the rest of Conde Nast? Would it make sense for Reddit to work with some P.E. people to buy themselves out, and make a venture investment in improving the site?

Why would anyone make a venture investment in some guys who just admitted that they can't think of how to make money on 280M uniques? Reddit was (perhaps not intentionally) built to flip. Mission accomplished.

Invest in the 280M uniques, not in the guys. Put the "Francis M. H. White of Monetization" in as CEO, let the founders be involved in other roles (they're great at building a community and at "ghetto" engineering).

That it is weak sauce now just means you could buy it cheaper. If I had $5-10mm (+100% debt) sitting around and nothing better to do with my life for 2-4 years, I'd be seriously tempted to make an offer to Conde Nast.

Re: Reddit needs help

#187

Post by tomjen3 »

asimjalis wrote: post #122

"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?

No, not the way they where doing it.

Today you can choose between Clozure lisp or Clojure, both of which runs the same on the different platforms and both of which are free.

Back then, the only way they could have pulled it of would be to use something like Lispworks or Franz lisp, both of which are super nice technologies that would be awesome to work with but they are also extreemly expensive (and I have no idea how they scale).

Re: Reddit needs help

#188

Post by ig1 »

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.

Agreed. I'd buy ads on several of the reddits if I could.

Re: Reddit needs help

#189

Post by petdog »

blhack wrote: post #170
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 you don't mind my answering this... Above here, I said that I would pay you $5 a month, and I would...but the only reason for that is that you I've talked to you on here (hacker news) before. To me the people runnign reddit are real . To me, you're a friend and I'm throwing $5 into the can that is duct-taped to your kegerator because you let me drink it for free... ...but for most people? What does reddit offer me…

> /r/pics? /r/askreddit? /r/iama?

What? /r/iama is one of the best things that happened to reddit. Sure, most of the submissions are shit, but some are golden.

> What does reddit offer me that I can't get elsewhere

The community. Most of the value is in the comments.

---

About usenet, you could try http://www.astraweb.com/

I bought the once-off 180gb plan. Text isn't even counted. It's going to last me years.

Re: Reddit needs help

#190

Post by mcdowall »

jedberg wrote: post #178
silverlake wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't you find interns to help you with stability? Even I would help for free just to get some experience with a very large site.

Each time we've had a new programmer come on board, it takes about 6 months for them to become familiar enough with the code to make a solid contribution. In the mean time, it actually slows us down a bit. That was the main reason we didn't seek programming interns this summer -- it's a great thought, but would probably take too long to ramp them up.

I will happily contribute some of my time each month to help you acquire targeted advertisers. I think you would find that in each country / subreddit the very community you foster will be more than willing to help you.

E-Mail is on my profile if you want to get in contact.

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