Reddit's not profitable though..
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Scaling Reddit from 1 Million to 1 Billion – Pitfalls and Lessons [video]
31–40 of 114 posts
Re: Scaling Reddit from 1 Million to 1 Billion – Pitfalls and Lessons [video]
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Reddit's not profitable though.. Source?
"I confirm that reddit is not profitable." Yishan Wong, CEO [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/CrazyIdeas/comments/1i7crj/antigold_... [2] http://blog.reddit.com/2013/08/reddit-myth-busters_6.html
I would find it incredibly strange if reddit is never able to make money. I don't think they are really trying at the moment.
Reddit is an incredibly valuable service. Maybe a lot of people on Hacker News don't see this, but reddit has basically become the Geocities of online discussion communities. The subreddit system has eliminated the "eternal september" problem, since all non-casual users will trickle into the communities that match their interests. Even if reddit loses 90% of its users, it will still be a highly relevant online community. I am certain that they can turn a (modest) profit if they really try.
Reddit will probably never become a massive money machine. But regardless, it is a very influential community. Even community is arguably an understatement at this point, it is really closer to infrastructure. As I have said here before, I would be willing to bet that it is still around in 10 years, with a significant (millions) amount of users.
Re: Scaling Reddit from 1 Million to 1 Billion – Pitfalls and Lessons [video]
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reddit has an exceptionally low cost to scale ratio. Where are you getting the information that they're not profitable at this point (I know they weren't in the past)?
Last time they shared, they were spending ridiculous amounts of money on Amazon ec2 a month. Like ridiculous amounts. Someday, the money will run out, and they'll have to try and turn a profit. Their business model is fundamentally bad.
If those outdated figures of ~$50k/month are true, I wonder if they could move to their own infrastructure or dedicated and turn some of those savings into getting from red to black.
Re: Scaling Reddit from 1 Million to 1 Billion – Pitfalls and Lessons [video]
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without cash flow, how far can the site go? Someone needs to pay the bandwidth/server bill. Not to mention it costs time to run a site. If you are working full-time at another job (because you aren't bringing any money in), you won't have any time to work on it. Reddit succeeded largely because the company that bought them is making money elsewhere.
>> Reddit succeeded largely because the company that bought them is making money elsewhere. Such a nonsense makes me angry. Surely you've heard about companies called Google, Facebook, Linkedin, that succeeded without being bought and for a long time not making a profit.
The difference is Reddit isn't particularly looking for profit. Unless they completely change their business and way of doing things (unlikely to happen), they probably will never make a profit.
Re: Scaling Reddit from 1 Million to 1 Billion – Pitfalls and Lessons [video]
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Large banner and tiny video frame, site rendering completely garbled for 8 seconds until fully loaded, signup required to view the slides (after realizing that the video doesn't cut to slides at all). The talks are interesting, and the interview transcription is nice though there are UX issues there as well– I need to click to view each response, and despite the entire question being hyperlinked clicking it actually…
> SlideShare plus an audio file is just perfect. Although slideshare is not as bad as infoq by a long shot, it's not very useable (or fast) either. I much prefer speakerdeck.
Speakerdeck is actually what I was thinking of, but the gist is slides + audio = happy. A more polished UI would do some good for SlideShare, but I don't have any major issues.
Re: Scaling Reddit from 1 Million to 1 Billion – Pitfalls and Lessons [video]
#36Re: Scaling Reddit from 1 Million to 1 Billion – Pitfalls and Lessons [video]
#37Reddit's not profitable though..
That doesn't mean you can't learn from it though.
Re: Scaling Reddit from 1 Million to 1 Billion – Pitfalls and Lessons [video]
#38Reddit's not profitable though..
Profitable is not that big a deal with something on the size and important of Reddit though.
Firstly, as with Wikipedia, if Reddit were forced to close because of money issues, Reddit could simply post a 'donate now or reddit shuts down' post and they would likely be rolling in millions of dollars.
Second, simply because reddit itself is not profitable does not mean people are not making a lot of money off reddit. The moderator system lends itself very well to a kind of 'corporate capture' of communities where moderators can be (and are) bought off for very tidy sums.
Re: Scaling Reddit from 1 Million to 1 Billion – Pitfalls and Lessons [video]
#39Reddit still uses Pylons, and I imagine moving to Pyramid would be very painful. He's not clear on this in the video.
Re: Scaling Reddit from 1 Million to 1 Billion – Pitfalls and Lessons [video]
#40Thrilled to finally see this on InfoQ -- already an underappreciated resource for technical talks. What is it about video + slides that appeals so little to people?
> What is it about video + slides that appeals so little to people
I don't have a solid block of 40 undisturbed minutes to listen to a talk. Give me a transcript and I can read a paragraph here and there as I do other things at my own pace. I might have ten minutes here, ten minutes there. I don't want to be constantly pausing/unpausing the video, or worse - switching between the video and my music.
Plus, if I concentrate, I could read a 40 minute talk in 20 minutes or less.
Basically, when I'm reading, I control the pace. I rarely watch videos that are longer than about 5 minutes (that aren't entertainment, which is entirely different).