

Condé Nast Spins Out Reddit, Without Letting Go - hornokplease
http://allthingsd.com/20110906/conde-nast-spins-out-reddit-without-letting-go/

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yalogin
Reddit's quality has gone down exponentially over the last year in line with
the exploding traffic. So the majority crowd is probably not the cynical tech
bunch anymore - translates to - it could get a little easier to monetize the
traffic.

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raldi
Every time a site's traffic doubles, it also doubles the number of people
saying it sucks.

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Permit
That has no bearing on the truth of the statement.

Personally, I have few qualms with the quality of the content on reddit. I
think the subreddit subscription model the site is centered around did an
excellent job at helping users weed out content they weren't interested in.

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bh42222
And the reddit enhancement suite will let you block imgur posts.

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bh42222
When this is the easiest way to give your growing product what it needs to
grow as fast as it can....

Also, anyone think 200mil is a bit cheap for reddit?

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staunch
If anything I think it's a bit high. The reddit community is so unruly that
monetizing the site effectively is a major challenge. It makes a good chunk of
money but it's very far from profitable I'd guess.

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cbs
>The reddit community is so unruly that monetizing the site effectively is a
major challenge.

Where unruly means willing to vote with their feet?

The biggest problem is that what users are getting at reddit isn't worth all
that much and can easily be found in other places online. The second problem
is that due to what it is, reddit attracts a greater level of people who don't
care for common monitization practices.

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evan_
> reddit attracts a greater level of people who don't care for common
> monitization practices.

That's a polite way of putting it. Every ad I've seen with a comments thread
has people mostly slagging off the advertiser. Ads without comment threads
frequently get nasty threads posted about them, which at least isn't as
visible, but if I were in charge of buying ads it would make me wonder why I
should continue paying to be attacked.

~~~
cbs
_That's a polite way of putting it._

But thats all it is. They're on a website where the community actively
discusses their opinion of submissions, and it was their opinion that the ad
or advertized product wasn't good.

I haven't been to reddit in a while, but when I did, I saw that when an
advertiser had a good product (I'm recalling A Small Orange or rsync.net) and
understood that they didn't need patronizing or dumb ads, the comments were
mostly inquiring about the service, or users saying they were happy with it.

~~~
_delirium
That's what happened with the old kuro5hin ads also, which also had comment
threads by default. Non-annoying ads that seemed like they had some idea of
what community they were targeting typically got good responses; annoying ads
that looked like they had no idea where they were advertising didn't. Of
course, some advertisers mixed the two, and deliberately antagonized the
audience to get attention
(<http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/12/5/1923/79187>).

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mmmmax
Kudos to Condé Nast for recognizing the importance of Reddit's independence
over the years, and handling the acquisition properly.

Aol, Microsoft and even Google could learn something from this...

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mkramlich
I think 90% of the time this kind of thing is done it's because they're
strongly considering selling it off. The rest is just excuses and standard
corporate verbage spam.

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Apocryphon
How analogous is this to the HN-YC relationship?

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Zakuzaa
For the better I think.

