Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reddit needs help

blog.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 258 posts

Re: Reddit needs help

#61

Post by tomjen3 »

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…

I am not so sure about that - Reddit is one of the only sites that I turned adblock of on - their ads were too interesting and too funny to hide, which is an amazing accomplishment.

And Reddit never did try very hard to moneytize their site, obvious things like self-serve ads that can be specialized on a subreddit (which means that you can target /r/haskell with job ads - imagine how many adds you can get for the price of one recruiter), the ability to pay to have ads turned of, merch that isn't to benefit a charity, etc.

Re: Reddit needs help

#63

Post by lsc »

avar wrote: post #11

According to this talk they're paying around $250k/year for server hosting at EC2: http://pycon.blip.tv/file/3257303/ See the question at around ~27m into the video.

with only four engineers, this is what I'd focus on, personally. hardware is not as hard or expensive to deal with as people seem to think, especially as they already have a SysAdmin.

Re: Reddit needs help

#64

Post by varaon »

davidw wrote: post #32

I don't know, I think paying money for nothing in return to a big corporation is a little bit insane, actually. $5, in the right hands, would go a long ways in Africa or various other places in the world where people have real, urgent needs. Or if that's not your thing, there are all kinds of real charities out there. Hell, if you want, you can send the money my way and I'll put it in my daughter's college education/…

Redditors contributed $185,000 to Direct Relief International to help in Haiti. Subscribing to reddit and donating aren't mutually exclusive.

DRI donation page: http://dri.convio.net/goto/reddit

Re: Reddit needs help

#65

Post by lsc »

run4yourlives wrote: post #26

I don't want to kick someone when they are down, but this just stood out to me: And reddit's revenue isn't great. The good news is, our traffic continues to grow by leaps and bounds. Talk about doing it wrong. When you have growth but no revenue, it's probably because you aren't asking your users to pay. That should be every website's first option - ask people to pay for the service they receive. Paying users are gre…

free is fine; the problem is that you can't make something with a high marginal cost and then give it away for free... This is why I think cheap infrastructure is so important.

Re: Reddit needs help

#66

Post by zach »

axod wrote: post #52
run4yourlives wrote: post #26

I don't want to kick someone when they are down, but this just stood out to me: And reddit's revenue isn't great. The good news is, our traffic continues to grow by leaps and bounds. Talk about doing it wrong. When you have growth but no revenue, it's probably because you aren't asking your users to pay. That should be every website's first option - ask people to pay for the service they receive. Paying users are gre…

Paying users aren't the only way. Reddit could have started at the outset with adverts. They could have made that decision early on that they were going to generate revenue. But they didn't - which is why Reddit has attracted the sort of demographic that don't click on ads.

A very good point -- the characteristics of a website's community is determined usually well before, and only rarely after, its point of big growth. Reddit definitely ended up with, um, less-monetizable DNA, and didn't want to "sell out," so that characteristic never changed.

It's also a good illustration of what Joe Kraus said in his brilliant Startup School speech -- when you put your product into beta, put your business model into beta at the same time.

They could at least make their ad display scripts deposit tokens for the user via async requests, and throttle users who run out of them. It's a better way of thanking me for not running AdBlock than a PNG of the alien giving me the thumbs up.

Re: Reddit needs help

#67

Post by potatolicious »

muppetman wrote: post #24
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.

Yup, I donated. They are so open and honest, they don't pull any tricks. The consistently listen to feedback. I see lots of people bashing reddit and from a glance at the Frontpage I can see why. But the real good stuff is in the subreddits. I'd also donate to HN too, if asked.

Having met a couple of the reddit guys, I gladly donated. They're the ones running the site and deciding how it evolves - not some faceless corporate drones at Conde.

Re: Reddit needs help

#68

Post by zyb09 »

zach wrote: post #55

I have to say, this looks bad for the whole "users first, revenue later" mantra. Now, admittedly, the founders got paid on the flip. But there are users, and now it's later, so... where is the revenue? I heard this moment described as the "where is the land" moment. The crew has been sailing the ocean for a long time and they're running on slim hope. They grumble, then complain, and finally they confront the captain…

This whole mantra was build on being bought by Google anyway.

Re: Reddit needs help

#69

Post by xal »

clistctrl wrote: post #9

Let me pay $10, and all I ask for in return is site stability and maybe a sweet icon next to my name when I comment. Honestly I bet you could get 100k subscribers within a week. People are hopelessly addicted to these aggregation services, and if subscribing gives us the self assurance that their be around for us to continue enjoying them the fee is worth it. I don't expect you to remove the sponsored ads either (act…

This is essentially how Shacknews worked since '99. People who subscribed got a lightning bold next to the name and got uncapped downloads on fileshack. This worked out very well for them.

Re: Reddit needs help

#70

Post by axod »

_pi wrote: post #57
axod wrote: post #47

lipstick.com was always going to be far easier to monetize. (The site Reddit made for Conde Naste before they bought Reddit). Celebs? Gossip? Woman demographics? non techie? Jeez you'd have been able to make millions... http://web.archive.org/web/20071025012630/http://lipstick.co... The site seems to have been killed and not used since 2007. Stupidly bad decision IMHO. Even if you stuck up a crappy website on that do…

To be honest Reddit isn't that techie anymore, reddit's demographics have shifted to teenage and young adult males and girls who are "geeks". Not only that but the default reddits are becoming a cesspool like Digg. Essentially the community had so much Digg hate in the beginning but at least Kevin Rose kept his site running while the demographics shifted.

Sure, I think their demographic has shifted away from techie. Now it's anti-consumerist adblock loving pot smokin' gay marriage loving liberals.
Post reply on HN