

Reddit Convinced Roughly 6,000 Users To Subscribe So Far - JarekS
http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/13/reddit-gold-update/

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GavinB
I think reddit made a mistake in setting the default as a one time donation
rather than a recurring one. You want to get people to commit to a
relationship when they are thinking about it and are motivated.

I donated, but who knows if I will even remember to think about it next month
or next year?

It feels a bit like they're squandering a great moment of user and media
attention. When they introduce a more substantial plan, the attention and
enthusiasm won't quite be there.

~~~
mrtron
I was really surprised they didn't launch a fark style "TotalReddit" with a
monthly subscription fee.

Learn from them - allow the subscription to be giftable so popular users get
memberships from people who dont mind paying a lot per month. A recurring
payment, not a 'donation' to a massive corporation. Have a separate subreddit
for these pro users where the non paying users can't access.

With their large core of highly active users, I would hazard a guess this
should generate them 500k annually.

Still - with their insanely high numbers of pageviews they should be able to
monetize that traffic reasonably well. Their ad model just seems to work
against normal advertiser campaigns, and they stated they didn't have anyone
in sales until recently. This seems so bizarre to me - most big corps monetize
products into the ground leveraging their existing ad channels.

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donohoe
I have spent more on Reddit (via this donation) than I have on print
subscriptions (Wired and others) for the last 3 years.

Go figure...

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pavs
I wrote this comment somewhere else:

\--------------------------------------

They had 8 million unique visitors in last month:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu/comments/co29o/c...](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...](http://dri.convio.net/site/TR?pg=fund&fr_id=1030&pxf..).

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SkyMarshal
I can't help but suspect that part of reddit's revenue problem just comes from
how they display adds on the site. Instead of lots of relevant text adds,
there's only one or two big graphic adds somewhere in the right column of the
page.

I wonder if their revenue would change any if they arranged their pages to
work more like Google search and email, with a string of text ads down the
right side.

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vecter
Breaking news: users pay for services they use.

All kidding aside, if I were still active on reddit, I wouldn't mind paying a
monthly fee if I really loved the content. I used to spend a crapload of time
on there before going cold-turkey, so at the peak of my usage, I would
confidently say the site was worth at least a few bucks per month to me. Part
of the reason is that I'm no longer a student and I've got disposable income.
I wonder how many other people on the net also realize that their is a "cost"
to their using the site, and that the cost is something they'd actually be
willing to pay for.

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b-e-p
I will never donate.

~~~
timdorr
But what if the semantics change and it's called "Subscribing"? Does that
affect your assessment? I think a lot of folks are treating this as a donation
(which is a side-effect of them using PayPal for this) and that's tainting
their perception of what this is all about.

~~~
b-e-p
I would not subscribe either. Reddit can easily make enough money from these
280m pageviews a month without resorting to these measures.

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jawngee
I donated. I'm not a huge reddit user, but I certainly appreciate their candor
and what they are doing.

I think social news is ultimately no good, however.

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JarekS
Interesting to see that only less then 0.1 percent of Reddit users donated. Is
there really no alternative for ad revenue in content startups?

~~~
jerf
There seem to be some missing pieces to your logic. The people making
donations are making donations equivalent to a very large number of ads. The
donations are equivalent to a fairly large number of ad _clicks_ , let alone
impressions. I'm not sure how this proves that ads are the only way to go,
when it was this "easy" to raise the equivalent of millions (probably
billions) of page views in a day.

This is why I'm uninterested in subscription Hulu for ~$10 a month; with my
viewing habits and never-click-on-ads behavior there's no way the ad revenue
for my viewing could _possibly_ top $.50 for a month, but for that $.50
they're willing to do grave damage to my viewing experience. Ads don't make
much money at all; it's not hard to make up for a lot of ads if people are
directly giving you cash.

