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Reddit reaches for profits through a geek-culture bazaar

reuters.com

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Re: Reddit reaches for profits through a geek-culture bazaar

#31

Post by rdtsc »

seiji wrote: post #14
calbear81 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit has always been anti-ads especially since they feel strongly that their userbase hates ads and would actually revolt in a mass uprising if Reddit started getting more aggressive with the ads they show. I'm actually with you about them finding more cost effective ways to serve all that content. I wonder if they should think about using peer-to-peer caching using HTML5/webworkers and other distributed caching me…

revolt in a mass uprising What actually happens: the old timers complain for three days then just put up with it. People still conflate online complaining with meaning and desires of the entire user base. Sadly, online comments aren't independent statistical samples from your entire user base. What's the rate again? 2% of users actively participate in sites while 98% happily browse and put up with ads?

> Sadly, online comments aren't independent statistical samples from your entire user base.

That idea cuts both ways. Sadly, also because they are not independent, the chance that those that comment and participate are probably also the ones that drive the community and make for nice discussion, which those other 98% who just browse end up reading. What else is Reddit if not links to contents followed by comments.

Those 2% stop, the site goes to crap.

Re: Reddit reaches for profits through a geek-culture bazaar

#32

Post by loceng »

minimaxir wrote: post #10
onedev wrote: post #8

Two words for ya reddit: "Feed Ads" (aka inserting ads in between pieces of organic content/stories) It works for Facebook, it works for Twitter, it will work for you. The only thing is you have to be careful how you present it and design it into the existing platform.

Feed Ads would cause a user revolt overnight . Reddit is caught between a rock and a hard place since users like Reddit because of the nonintrusive ads.

Within a few minutes...

Re: Reddit reaches for profits through a geek-culture bazaar

#33

Post by bhaumik »

How would the HN community react if any of the ideas suggested in this thread were implemented by PG?

Non-redditors need to understand the overwhelming revolt against any sort of advertisement in the reddit community. Yishan Wong (CEO) had to respond to one of the "top" comments when this article was posted in r/technology[1].

While reddit "fans" will support the company through "Reddit Gold"[2], advertisements in the form of "sponsored links" or "feed ads" doesn't seem to work under the beloved format [ex: 3]. If you're interested in learning about Condé Nast and other investors , I found a "myth busters" blog post [4].

[1]http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1tvfze/reddit_is...

[2]http://blog.reddit.com/2013/10/thanks-for-gold.html

[3]http://www.reddit.com/comments/1o6f63/now_you_can_fly_histor...

[4]http://blog.reddit.com/2013/08/reddit-myth-busters_6.html

Re: Reddit reaches for profits through a geek-culture bazaar

#34

Post by weisser »

calbear81 wrote: post #5
seunosewa wrote: post #2

Dear Reddit, Making money on the Internet is a solved problem. You just need to sell ads. Please suspend these nerdy business experiments and just focus on improving and promoting your ad platform. That is literally all you need to do. And even if you choose not to do that, you can achieve profitability within the next 2 months by merely moving away from AWS to a more cost-effective website hosting platform, since ho…

Reddit has always been anti-ads especially since they feel strongly that their userbase hates ads and would actually revolt in a mass uprising if Reddit started getting more aggressive with the ads they show. I'm actually with you about them finding more cost effective ways to serve all that content. I wonder if they should think about using peer-to-peer caching using HTML5/webworkers and other distributed caching me…

Perhaps most interesting is the fact that every Hipmunk advertisement I've seen on Reddit has some of the harshest comments.

Re: Reddit reaches for profits through a geek-culture bazaar

#35

Post by candeira »

Some time ago I read that Andover.net/Geeknet made most of its money via ThinkGeek. It still didn't made the company any profit [1].

[1] - http://beta.fool.com/ddelony/2012/09/20/will-selling-slashdo...

But making profit off selling stuff is only half the challenge. As the sale of Slashdot to Dice Holdings illustrates, the Internet doesn't quite like cross-subsidies. That's what's undoing traditional media: in newspapers, the cartoon page attracted viewers and the real estate listings attracted paying advertisers, and between those the paper rag could pay for the foreign correspondents, or for the reporter at Town Hall. Now it's everyone for themselves, and some outlets make writers responsible for their own traffic, article per article. That's how we end up with listicles all over the place.

But I digress. Reddit has two challenges: one, make the profit off sales that it can't make off running The Front Page of the Internet. Two, maintain the cross-subsidy once the managers realise they have a profitable store weighed down by this money-losing forum, so hey, "couldn't we make more profit if we didn't have the forum?"

Re: Reddit reaches for profits through a geek-culture bazaar

#36

Post by username223 »

seiji wrote: post #30
username223 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making a huge, possibly fatal assumption that Seiji views human beings as anything other than clicking machines attached to credit cards, there to be exploited. As Kant said: "view people always as a means, never as an end."

Just for posterity: that's not my view, but that is the exact view of visionary sv asshole ceos (note: not of the good ceos, just the jerk ceos). In their eyes, you only exist as "traffic" for them to exploit. You are not an individual. You have no life. You are a finger attached to a pointing device attached to a credit card. Their goal in life is to divert Internet traffic to their own sites by any means necessary…

We who shall be fleeced salute you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ave_Caesar_morituri_te_salutant

Re: Reddit reaches for profits through a geek-culture bazaar

#37

Post by [deleted] »

rhizome wrote: post #26
seiji wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quality of submissions or comments? I was part of another forum-based company that went from zero advertising to full display advertising with banners and adsense (the ads brought in another $200k to $500k per month). Some of the vocal members (read: always bitchy about everything, even mild color or margin changes) complained at first, then went back to their normal bitching about everything else in the world. All c…

Quality of the site as a whole, both subs and comments. Again, you're assuming that the presence of additional advertising will have no effect on the content. Perhaps your example webboard always sucked, you know? One additional way to look at it is to gauge whether your webboard is more popular and/or more highly trafficked than its related subreddits. This last point doesn't necessarily speak to content quality, bu…

[deleted]

Re: Reddit reaches for profits through a geek-culture bazaar

#38

Post by dreamfactory »

seunosewa wrote: post #2

Dear Reddit, Making money on the Internet is a solved problem. You just need to sell ads. Please suspend these nerdy business experiments and just focus on improving and promoting your ad platform. That is literally all you need to do. And even if you choose not to do that, you can achieve profitability within the next 2 months by merely moving away from AWS to a more cost-effective website hosting platform, since ho…

Online display advertising is dead, even the biggest web publishers are trying to develop alternative streams and get off it. The money is now all in commerce and engagement (leading to commerce).

Re: Reddit reaches for profits through a geek-culture bazaar

#39

Post by Adirael »

username223 wrote: post #28
seiji wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

could risk a Digg-like exodus That only happens if there is somewhere else to jump to. What else is there? We don't use the best of all possible systems, we use the best available system, which is always highly imperfect.

What else is there? Any forum with threads, voting, and karma. The software is freely available, in multiple forms.

But not the people. Empty forums are boring. They have the mindshare. There were alternatives to Twitter (some of them open source) but no one has fled to them no matter how much they cripple the APIs or how many ads they put.

Re: Reddit reaches for profits through a geek-culture bazaar

#40

Post by dreamfactory »

seiji wrote: post #14
calbear81 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit has always been anti-ads especially since they feel strongly that their userbase hates ads and would actually revolt in a mass uprising if Reddit started getting more aggressive with the ads they show. I'm actually with you about them finding more cost effective ways to serve all that content. I wonder if they should think about using peer-to-peer caching using HTML5/webworkers and other distributed caching me…

revolt in a mass uprising What actually happens: the old timers complain for three days then just put up with it. People still conflate online complaining with meaning and desires of the entire user base. Sadly, online comments aren't independent statistical samples from your entire user base. What's the rate again? 2% of users actively participate in sites while 98% happily browse and put up with ads?

> What actually happens

You have Digg as an example of what happens.

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