I see no evidence in the post that they are thinking about implementing broader ways of monetising their traffic. There were wonderful suggestions --in HN and reddit proper-- in response to their first plea for help. Are they going to ignore other recommended approaches (e.g maintaining a proper ad inventory, sponsored sub reddits, employing a dedicated biz dev team, and so on) and assume that pledge drives will scale into the future?
This was a triumph.
31–40 of 53 posts
Re: This was a triumph.
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would be their undoing. The last thing egalitarian reddit needs is a class system. Or maybe I am wrong, Slashdot has been starring their paid subscribes for ages, but I am not sure reddit wants to stoop to slashdot levels.
Stoop to? I love reddit dearly, but there are some days when you could run it through. sed -e 's/narwal/Natalie Portman/' and get something that was recognizably slashdot circa 2002.
Considering all the old slashdot fans had to have gone somewhere, I wonder why...
Re: This was a triumph.
#33I see no evidence in the post that they are thinking about implementing broader ways of monetising their traffic. There were wonderful suggestions --in HN and reddit proper-- in response to their first plea for help. Are they going to ignore other recommended approaches (e.g maintaining a proper ad inventory, sponsored sub reddits, employing a dedicated biz dev team, and so on) and assume that pledge drives will scal…
I'd give them some time.
They are not too sure about monetisation strategy so for them the best thing to do right now is not promise anything.
Re: This was a triumph.
#34I personally donated $3.14 it would be interesting to see how much people donated or more data like average donation etc...
I laid down $40. There was a thread in /r/lounge where people posted donation amounts.
The average seemed to be around $10; however, there were donations as low as $0.01 and as high as $1000.
Re: This was a triumph.
#35Don't you think they should be showing comments from "gold" users differently? Kind of like what PG did a while ago using different colors highlight distinguished users...
That would segment Reddit immediately into at least four communities among the gold/ungold and supports-highlighting/opposes-highlighting axes, and I suspect many members of those communities are going to be violently passionate that only their position is acceptable for True Reddit Supporters and that the heretics must burn.
Maybe being able to buy virtual swag might be a better way to go for Reddit, in a similar fashion to Dungeons & Dragons Online.
Tiny [icons] of narwhal tusks, lolcats or rashers of bacon that could appear next to your name could prove quite popular with the community. Similarly, being able to not only upvote, downvote, but also put a 'hex' on a comment I could see as being an amusing pastime. Not to mention, they already have the beginnings of an achievement system in place with the awards panel. I could see them greatly expanding that with quest style achievements; "posted 5 links", say, to earn /reddit/credits.
I'm not sure how it would affect the community, but the revenue possibilities are endless.
Re: This was a triumph.
#36Congrats to reddit team, despite some frequent "this is not reddit" remarks here on HN I still love that community. Out of curiosity I just checked compete.com and was disappointed to learn that Digg is approximately 8 times as big, lets hope that's the measurement error.
Compete is whack. And this is not only true for reddit, why would anyone trust an analytic that doesn't have _direct_ access to your traffic numbers?
http://www.reddit.com/r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu/comments/co29o/c...
Re: This was a triumph.
#37I see no evidence in the post that they are thinking about implementing broader ways of monetising their traffic. There were wonderful suggestions --in HN and reddit proper-- in response to their first plea for help. Are they going to ignore other recommended approaches (e.g maintaining a proper ad inventory, sponsored sub reddits, employing a dedicated biz dev team, and so on) and assume that pledge drives will scal…
They didn't explicitly say anything on the blog post because they don't have power to higher anyone without getting permission from above, they can't even get new servers without getting permission first. The best way to know what going on is to follow the developers/admins comments who are very much involved within the discussion:
http://www.reddit.com/user/raldi/ is more open than others.
http://www.reddit.com/user/jedberg &
http://www.reddit.com/user/KeyserSosa are the other two admins
Edit: Raldi mentioned that they are getting offers from other CN properties (ie, Wired) to help them with sales/marketing.
Re: This was a triumph.
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Out of 8 million active users. So 0.075% donated. About one donation per thousand users.
Whoa whoa whoa, I don't think reddit has even close to 8 million active users. I'd say much closer to about 100,000. The announcement section, which is included by default, and low traffic enough that I doubt anybody unsubscribes, has 300,000 users. Even if they're retaining 30% of their users (and keeping them as active), that still isn't even close to 8 million.
They had 8 million unique visitors in last month:
http://www.reddit.com/r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu/comments/co29o/c...
To put things in to context, reddit ran a haiti donation campaign which was heavily promoted through their ad spaces and blog postings and individual "donation drive threads" and they raised $185k from 3783 users over a period of ~30 days. They broke their first 100k within 12 hours. So if they got 6000 people to donate within 48 hours or so, that pretty damn good, over next few weeks as they add subscription only features its bound to get much much higher number as it gets promoted more.
http://dri.convio.net/site/TR?pg=fund&fr_id=1030&pxf...
They didn't release the money amount yet because they are waiting for "confirmation" from higher up to reveal the numbers.
Re: This was a triumph.
#39Congrats. :)
It's worth noting that this won't ever happen again, though. This was basically a one-time gain of $X. So hopefully they don't wind up back in this situation.
Re: This was a triumph.
#40So the newly acquired cash is dumped into amazon EC2 again...