

Reddit's traffic grew by 300% in 2010 - Aqwis
http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/evmek/2010_we_hardly_knew_ye/

======
Mystalic
Title's wrong. Growing by 300% means Reddit would be at 1 billion pageviews.
Grow by 100%, you get 500 million. Grow by 200%, you get 750 million. Grow by
231.6%, you get 829 million.

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tzs
They are not handling the load well, and it is getting bad enough to
discourage me from commenting there. It was annoying but livable when it was
just slow loading when reading, but lately it has progressed to errors when
trying to post. That is a lot more annoying because then you've either got to
give up on the post, or save a copy somewhere to try again later.

It's also losing the status of inboxes. That is, it will show the orange
envelope meaning you've got a message (typically someone replied to one of
your comments). You then click that to see the reply, and it just sits there
not responding. If you give up and go elsewhere, it often has marked your
messages as read, even though you never saw them.

I'd prefer if posting and dealing with the inbox were given high priority,
even if it meant more "you broke reddit" messages when I try to read stories.

~~~
jedberg
We're almost ready to hire a couple of really awesome folk. Then we have to
train them. Then they can be useful and help us make the site faster and more
stable.

We're just really constrained on human time right now.

~~~
adrianbye
so hire people you don't have to train. you have enough traffic to monetize a
better team

~~~
jedberg
Even the smartest person in the world will have to learn our architecture and
codebase, our processes, our logins, our machine names, etc.

No matter how amazing they are, I'm not giving them the root password on the
first day or letting them redo the databases or write major code changes.

Everyone requires training.

~~~
die_sekte
You obviously need Roger, the cokefiend.
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2065416>)

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vladd
Traffic in December exhibits weird patterns (lower for business sites and
higher for leisure sites due to the holidays).

I wonder if they avoided a December 2009 to December 2010 comparison on
purpose (or if they preferred the Jan-vs-Dec one to get a better growth).

~~~
corin_
Not quite as simple as business vs. leisure, but I agree that the only reason
they'd chose Dec10/Jan10 not Dec10/Dec09 is to make the stats look more
impressive.

~~~
jedberg
Actually, they would have been more impressive if we did Dec to Dec. Our
traffic is usually down in Dec.

We did it that way because we were reviewing 2010.

~~~
corin_
Then that's really odd, the way any business would normally review a year's
performance is to compare December/December, because that's the best way to
get a decent comparison without being influenced by factors such as "Our
traffic is usually down in Dec." Same thing for other time periods - if you
want to see how good traffic was over a weekend, you don't compare Sat/Sun to
Thur/Fri, you compare Sat/Sun to the previous week's Sat/Sun.

    
    
      Our traffic is usually down in Dec.
    

Oddly, I've found that to be the case every year, across a range of non-
business for-leisure websites.

~~~
jedberg
We weren't trying to review our performance year to year though. We were just
showing how the beginning of 2010 compared to the end.

All the media decided to make it a year over year comparison, which it was
never intended as.

------
elvirs
I remember a few years back top bloggers and industry 'experts' talking about
reddit being toasted in competition with digg. Amazing momentum after 5 years.
Congrats.

~~~
dhughes
At the bottom of articles on websites when I see share on digg and delicious
icons I think "Oh my."

------
stevefink
I wonder how much of that traffic is from folks who ditched Digg?

~~~
andrewljohnson
Judging by Quantcast, it's not correlated. Reddit has been steadily growing,
and Digg just did a face plant.

~~~
mikeryan
Reddit has stated that Quantcast and Compete's numbers are pretty much flat
wrong for them. You'd have to assume the same for digg.

[http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/experts-misunderestimate-
our-...](http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/experts-misunderestimate-our-
traffic.html)

~~~
slig
What about adplanner data?

[https://www.google.com/adplanner/planning/site_profile?hl=en...](https://www.google.com/adplanner/planning/site_profile?hl=en#siteDetails?identifier=reddit.com&geo=001&trait_type=1&lp=true)

Seems to be right, as it comes from Analytics.

~~~
mikeryan
That shows a huge spike in traffic in late August and Sept, right around the
launch of the digg redesign, unlike Quantcast and Compete ;-)

------
absconditus
And revenue? Will we see more begging for money this year?

~~~
cookiecaper
Reddit Gold is not really "begging". They allow you to set your own price for
an enhanced set of features. While Reddit Gold is mostly about expressing your
support for Reddit, it's not a straight up donation, and Reddit didn't spend
two months with a banner at 25% screen height with a bearded kn0thing or
ketralnis staring down the userbase.

~~~
JeremyBanks
_set your own price_

That was only the deal for the first couple of days; it now has a fixed price
of $4 (or a postcard) per month.

------
diego
The search: sucked => works part is us (IndexTank). Thanks Reddit for the
mention!

------
dezwald
I'm curious to know if it's reddit's GUi design/usability or it's
content/community that keeps it a growing success.

For me, it's their design approach that i enjoy using, especially after
reviewing their second project, hipmunk.

~~~
vessenes
Interesting. I came to Reddit for the intelligent conversation compared to
Digg. The commenting system was pretty great, as well as the subreddit system
though, so I'd call it as a good mix of people and UI.

Eventually, I realized it was wasting my time like digg, just in a less
obvious way. Also, the community had grown enough that those long joke threads
and aggressive attempts at meme creation were hurting my enjoyment. These are
not solvable problems on reddit in my opinion. I finally turned in the towel
after an extremely long thread on how useless churches are in America:
criticize all you want, (and I will certainly continue to do so), but churches
feed and take care of homeless people and poor people in every county (and
probably, town) of America.

My final solution was to add the following to my /etc/hosts file:

174.132.225.106 reddit.com www.reddit.com

This has saved me a lot of time. In exchange, I've missed (I imagine) many
outrage-generating stories on US civil rights, a lot of great pictures of
cats, and in exchange get to skip reading the perspectives of many, many 4chan
alums.

~~~
nowarninglabel
The trick to post-2008 Reddit is to be very, very judicious about which sub-
reddits you subscribe to. There are still quite a few gems. I've flirted with
abandoning ship since the early 2009 hockey stick growth, but found peace by
continuously weeding out sub-reddits that had gone bad. It's kind of like
pruning a bonzai tree.

~~~
redthrowaway
This is my go-to answer to anyone who complains about pun threads and whatnot.
If you're running into that stuff, you're on the wrong subreddits. My
discussions there are perfectly enjoyable since removing r/atheism, r/pics,
r/reddit.com, etc.

------
staunch
How many monthly uniques?

~~~
jedberg
About 12 million last month. About 5 million last January.

------
samratjp
Congrats Reddit! Wish you and Hipmunk greater success in 2011 :-)

~~~
kn0thing
Why thank you!

------
axod
No mention of revenue or profit or how many millions they're paying Amazon for
hosting.

Traffic is great but profit is better.

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michaelty
Any overflow effect on HN?

~~~
Aqwis
I for one found HN through Reddit.

~~~
redthrowaway
Same. Given that HN was originally supposed to be _part_ of Reddit, that's not
surprising.

~~~
jedberg
> Given that HN was originally supposed to be part of Reddit, that's not
> surprising.

What makes you say that?

~~~
redthrowaway
I thought the story was that PG wanted his own subreddit where nobody could
downvote, you said no, so he built HN (this is a paraphrasing of hazy
memories)

edit: If memory serves, Steve mentioned this offhand in a video interview I
saw somewhere. I think this one, but I could be wrong.

[http://blog.hipmunk.com/mixergy-interview-with-steve-
huffman...](http://blog.hipmunk.com/mixergy-interview-with-steve-huffman-on-
reddi)

~~~
kn0thing
That is correct.

