Reddit reaches for profits through a geek-culture bazaar
1–10 of 47 posts
Re: Reddit reaches for profits through a geek-culture bazaar
#2Dear 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 hosting costs are your greatest expense.
Since you can easily raise revenue and cut costs at the same time, if you're not profitable in the next 2 months, it's only because you don't want to be profitable. And, hey, that's cool if your investors don't care.
Re: Reddit reaches for profits through a geek-culture bazaar
#3Reddit's real product has always been its hipness. You introduce something on Reddit, and 1000 bots-or-people "upvote" it, and suddenly the press picks up on the story.
How does this translate into dollars and cents? Reddit could use its platform to popularize new hip counterculture products. When advertisers purchase ad space, the real ads would be in the links and comments.
All it takes is about a dozen people to upvote something within the first 8-10 minutes after it is posted and it stands a good chance of "going viral." That's harder to sell than ads, but perhaps more valuable.
Re: Reddit reaches for profits through a geek-culture bazaar
#4Dear 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…
But the cloud(aws) allows them to synergise,autoscale,growthhack,no-harddrives(ebs),pricey bandwidth(ec2) etc.
Re: Reddit reaches for profits through a geek-culture bazaar
#5Dear 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 methods. Given that the community has strong support for reddit (they even give money freely via the donation bar), maybe they would be okay with allowing spare bandwidth to be used to keep the site running.
On the ads side, I think the proprietary system they have is not doing them any favors when it comes to getting a piece of the ad spend pie during RFPs. I don't even know how an advertiser would begin to figure out which subreddits they should target w/o having to sit down and dive into all the stats. The other core issue I think is that reddit specifically touts the fact that you target by subreddit not by demographics/users/behavior, etc. but I think that data is extremely important to most advertisers.
Re: Reddit reaches for profits through a geek-culture bazaar
#6Dear 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…
My understanding about the advertising ecosystem on Reddit is such that the returns on the actual advertising platform are far, far worse than grassroots marketing (not even talking about sneaky stuff -- participating in the community, doing AMAs, generally just hanging around).
Re: Reddit reaches for profits through a geek-culture bazaar
#7Reddit's real product has always been its hipness. You introduce something on Reddit, and 1000 bots-or-people "upvote" it, and suddenly the press picks up on the story. How does this translate into dollars and cents? Reddit could use its platform to popularize new hip counterculture products. When advertisers purchase ad space, the real ads would be in the links and comments. All it takes is about a dozen people to u…
>Reddit's real product has always been its hipness.
I disagree. Their strength (in my view) is that its a build your own community DIY. If you feel strongly about turnips then start a turnip subreddit. vb forum etc doesn't have that flexibility.
EDIT: FML...someone claimed /r/turnips already.
Re: Reddit reaches for profits through a geek-culture bazaar
#8Two 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.
Re: Reddit reaches for profits through a geek-culture bazaar
#9The tech posts by their admins always make for good reading. Initially I thought "how hard can it be?", but they have to generate so much of their stuff dynamically that I'd be seriously impressed if they can make the numbers work. Especially since that dynamic complexity doesn't scale all that well.
Re: Reddit reaches for profits through a geek-culture bazaar
#10Two 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.