

Condé Nast finally throws Reddit a bone, new hires coming - logicalmoron
http://blog.reddit.com/2011/02/reddit-undergoes-dramatic-expansion.html

======
cryptoz
It doesn't sound like CN has really changed their attitude much. The news in
this blog post is fantastic! But it sounds like the money is coming from Gold
subscribers, not CN. Reddit is either already bigger than Wired - or probably
will be soon...they have > 1 billion pageviews / month. It's totally crazy
that they run the site with about 5 people.

I've been there for almost five years, and I have to say I've loved every
minute of it. Back then it was smaller and nerdier, and now it's all big and
popular but you can still find the same cozy space in the smaller communities
(/r/coding, /r/compsci, for example).

~~~
cagenut
pageviews aren't what matter anymore, UV/month is.

comscore's january numbers just came out this morning. Wired droped 38% from
9.4 to 5.9 million. In one month. Hopefully for their sake thats a javascript
screw up.

reddit rose 11% from 1.0 to 1.1 million. Again, in one month.

so if you were to over-extrapolate here you could say that reddit will
overtake wired maybe late this year, but as it stands now wired is >6x bigger
a media property.

~~~
wheels
> _reddit rose 11% from 1.0 to 1.1 million_

The numbers that they show (the same place the one-billion pageviews stat
comes from) indicate that they're now closer to 14 million monthly uniques:

<http://www.reddit.com/tb/fdyyf>

~~~
cagenut
comscore's numbers are notoriously lower than quantcast/google-analytics, but
usually about half not 1/14th... so somethings clearly wrong there too.

~~~
SpikeGronim
I do not trust comscore's numbers at all. They rely on opt-in sampling of user
data. There is obvious selection bias there. Large companies will never allow
such tracking software, so anybody browsing from work will never be counted.
There are many other large demographics that they just plain miss. They have a
history of goofing badly, for example being directionally wrong about Google's
ad revenue [1].

1\. [http://seekingalpha.com/article/72911-why-was-everyone-
wrong...](http://seekingalpha.com/article/72911-why-was-everyone-wrong-on-
google)

------
wildmXranat
Hmm, I wonder if this announcement comes on the heels of momentum where users
are not renewing the gold subscriptions. I'm not sure of that and I'm purely
speculating, but I think the average initial subscription amount was about $10
and those would expiring around now. Just guessing.

This sort of action would be a good way for CN to rope back in any doubters
that their $$ will benefit the site.

edit: I know they indeed beefed up investments in hardware and I was referring
to hiring more devs.

~~~
tesseract
That or maybe the users _are_ renewing, giving reddit some confidence to make
a long term commitment by hiring, rather than spending the subscription money
on hardware.

------
kprobst
I wish there was a way for these guys to disengage from the Death Star and go
independent. It doesn't seem like living inside CN has a ton of advantages
anyway.

Maybe the ultimate Reddit community project would be to raise a large amount
of capital to buy the site from CN.

~~~
sachinag
Ben Huh has offered to negotiate with Conde Nast for Reddit. He also has $30
million in new investor cash that he's sitting on.

Also, this: [http://www.itworld.com/offbeat/134411/animated-take-
cheezbur...](http://www.itworld.com/offbeat/134411/animated-take-cheezburger-
networks-30m-vc-round)

~~~
honeycrisp
Yeah, but being owned by Ben Huh wouldn't be any better than being owned by
Conde Nast. It would probably be far worse.

------
nbpoole
...and Reddit is currently down (well, in emergency read-only mode). :(

~~~
forwardslash
Where do you go when Reddit is down?

------
fourply
i am trying to be generally optimistic, but it seems pretty likely that Conde
Nast is going to eventually want to monetize the reddit community in ways that
no one will like. without some sort of payoff at the end of the road, i can't
imagine why they'd agree to additional hires.

~~~
tesseract
CN could start by helping reddit sell their banner ad inventory... it's got to
be less than 1% of the time that I see a real ad, rather than reddit self-
promotions or something for another CN property running in that slot.

~~~
presidentender
"Something for another CN property" could well be the payoff.

~~~
tesseract
True although the number of those seems to be, if anything, decreasing.

------
iamelgringo
The engineering team at Reddit manages 250M pageviews per engineer. That has
to be some kind of record. Has any other site ever hit the Alexa 100 with only
4 engineers?

Kudos.

~~~
mdonahoe
Perhaps Craigslist?

30 employees and 20 billion pageviews/month. Not clear how many of those
people are engineers.

<http://www.craigslist.org/about/factsheet>

pg makes reference to it in this essay <http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html>

------
KMStraub
This is indeed great news, but I can't believe what CN has done to this
company. Well, I actually can because I worked at CN for 4 years and saw
extremely little investment in long-term digital strategy. There were a lot of
tricks being thought of to try to get an edge, but they still have too many
print dinosaurs who are terrified of losing their jobs calling the shots. And
I'm not saying these print dinosaurs couldn't very easily evolve and learn
what they need to learn and be what the publisher needs to stay afloat. I'm
saying there's this cloud of fear looming over everyone's heads there that's
suffocating any potential for innovation.

------
dhughes
Reddit has been down for two days maybe that was the kick in the pants they
needed.

~~~
mkr-hn
Reddit is down half the time because people flocked to it when Digg went
south. Any team would struggle to keep up with that kind of growth.

<http://siteanalytics.compete.com/digg.com+reddit.com/>

A sudden influx of 100k people overnight is not easy to manage.

The number on the visits graph is even more substantial.

~~~
hessenwolf
Well, some of us were knocked on to hacker news as a result. It's like a
cashflow waterfall. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securitization>

~~~
leon_
Oh, that explains much.

