

Reddit Sees Massive Growth & Hires New Programmers - staunch
http://blog.reddit.com/2011/06/reddit-levels-up-with-three-new.html

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dreamux
Not surprising, Reddit was in the perfect position at the perfect time to suck
up all of Digg's traffic when they briefly faltered.

On top of that they've curated not just a large community (and even more
impressive -- self-sustaining sub-communities) but a culture that is just as
sticky as the content. They are properly entrenched now.

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famousactress
_"our average time on site has remained steady at an impressive 15 and a half
minutes"_

Wow. I find this number pretty staggering, but I'm not familiar with traffic
patterns on discussion & news sites. Can anyone who is weigh in with how this
compares to other news or discussion sites?

~~~
buro9
It's impressive when compared to, say, a news or review website. But it's not
that impressive for a discussion forum.

I run several discussion forums, and average time on site ranges from 9
minutes (the one with least loyalty) through to fractionally over 17 minutes
(the one with pretty good loyalty).

I'd be far more interested in knowing reddit's bounce rate and spread of
recency and loyalty. Those are the killer metrics... just how obsessed are
your users?

I'm pretty proud of one of my sites having a bounce rate of only 18%. Now that
is a fairly unheard of number for a decent sized site.

Another site I run has over 26% of users having visited 201+ times. Loyalty
off the scale.

What I've found is that it's fairly easy to build in a high frequency of
existing users returning soon and of extending the time on the site, but it's
much harder to build actual visitor numbers.

Basically communities have natural size limits before they crumble a bit, and
reddit's magic sauce is subreddits and the ability to carry on pretending
reddit is small when it's really large.

~~~
hueypriest1
Our % of users who return 201+ times per month is over 30%

Here's some other Loyalty numbers for reddit (March - May 2011):

\- Over 38% of our audience spend more that 10min per visit to reddit, Over
17% spends more than 30minutes per visit \- Over 88% of audience visits reddit
multiple times a day \- Over 20% of our audience visit more than 20 pages per
visit \- New visitors to reddit account for 16.65% of our traffic & spend and
average of 7:58 time on site \- Returning visitors to reddit account for
83.35% of our traffic and spend an average of 17:31 time on site \- Bounce
rate is ~ 26%

~~~
buro9
For the size of reddit, that bounce rate is awesome. As are your loyalty
numbers.

It's well known that forums are sticky, but your loyalty numbers confirm
you're a gem.

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kin
The Reddit community has really become something incredible. They really have
to be careful and not upset their community through selfish monetize
strategies like Digg. They've done great so far. I vote that they monetize by
Gold memberships, donations, merchandise, and that tiny ad box on the right
(which should start having actual advertisements - simple ones, no flash
intrusions).

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daedhel
Strangely, this growth happens in the exact same time I ponder leaving reddit
because of its degradation.

~~~
blhack
Check these:

<http://www.reddit.com/r/truereddit>

<http://www.reddit.com/r/indepthstories>

<http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience>

<http://www.reddit.com/r/earthporn>

~~~
cowkingdeluxe
reddit.com/r/frugal has also been good for me.

~~~
blhack
/r/frugal can get a _little_ crazy at times, but yes, I subscribe as well :)

also: <http://reddit.com/r/bicycling>

<http://reddit.com/r/linguistics>

<http://reddit.com/r/beer>

<http://reddit.com/r/homebrewing>

reddit is a fantastic site for communities. The defaults are way too crowded,
but the smaller subs are awesome.

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tokenadult
What is Conde Nast's plan for monetizing Reddit? How much operating profit
would it take to recover the investment that bought Reddit?

~~~
blhack
I'm not sure what Conde's plan is, but I really would love to see reddit run
[1]viglinks on the site. If you're not familiar with it, viglinks uses some
javascript to append an affiliate ID to any outbound links on the site (and
it's completely transparent to the user).

I see people linking me to amazon _all the time_ when I ask for book
recommendations. Often, I end up buying things as a result of things I see on
reddit.

(I don't work for viglinks, but I think the idea behind it is brilliant. As a
user, this is the most non-intrusive way to monetize a site I've yet seen.)

[1]<http://www.viglink.com/>

~~~
jaz
This would be interesting - although I wonder if there would be any negative
reaction from redditors. Posterous tried this out last year[1].

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1309403>

~~~
blhack
I think that the problem there was posterous didn't communicate this to their
users.

Reddit does a fantastic job of communicating with the users; if they explained
what was happening, I think the users would be fine with it.

~~~
code_duck
I agree, I especially think that Redditors would be happy to support Reddit in
a way that leaves them with the same amount of money, Amazon with less and
Reddit with more.

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mindblink
Numbers look great. Time on site is an average of 15 and a half minutes, which
is pretty impressive user engagement. Looks like Conde Naste is committing
some additional investment into Reddit. It will interesting to see how they
try to generate revenue.

