
Reddit needs help - icey
http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/reddit-needs-help.html
======
ww520
Time to hire some business folks? Really, now it is not the time to talk about
server expansion or more page views. The highest priority now is monetization.
They need to come up with ways to get paid sufficiently to expand.

Here are the things they can do: 1\. Place more ads. I don't buy the notion
that many reddit users run ad-blockers. Even half of them do, you still get
140M/month page views. 2\. Get Google AdSense, to place content-related ads.
3\. Sponsorship. Have companies to sponsor some subreddits and add companies
promotion and events. 4\. Paid submission, clearly marked so. Company ad and
product/service announcement can go there. E.g. all the webhosting promotion
deals going on now. 5\. Create some deal/coupon/onsales subreddits. Have
companies feed them and pay for them. Rather than just having user-generated
content, have companies generated content as well, and get paid for them. 6\.
CPA revenue sharing. Give redditers some percentage of discount when they go
to a merchant's site to purchase something from a reddit link. Reddit takes a
cut. It's a win-win-win setup, merchant sells a product minus the marketing
cost which becomes the redditers' discount and reddit's share.

There are so many ways to skin this cat. They are sitting on a good problem to
have. Why are they fumbling on this?

~~~
jedberg
Thanks for the suggestions. Some we have tried, others we would like to, and
some are totally new.

The big problem is that we spend most of our time just keeping the site up and
don't have time to focus on these ideas, and Conde is unwilling to invest.

We're hoping the reddit gold money gives us the flexibility to bring in the
talent we need to make some of those ideas happen.

~~~
il
I've had experience successfully monetizing all sorts of low-quality traffic,
and I can tell you that it's possible to get decent CPM from any type of
users, even users like redditors who don't click on ads as much. You should be
able to easily pull at least $2 CPM from general/frontpage reddit traffic, and
probably closer to $10 CPM from specific subreddits. At 280M pageviews, that's
over $500K a month in revenue you're missing out on.

If I had to monetize reddit right now, I would throw up some CPM ads from a
premium display network, and then begin aggressively going after big brand
advertisers and media buyers. This might mean spending money and hiring at
least one ad sales person- but the investment will recoup itself many times
over when media buys from big brands start coming in.

Right now, reddit is doing a TERRIBLE job of managing ad inventory,
particularly remnant inventory. It also doesn't look easy for advertisers to
place ads on reddit. I see a contact form for more information about
advertising, but where is your media kit? User demographics? Not all ads are
bad, only untargeted ones are. Why aren't there ads for Newegg, or Snorg tees,
or collegehumor, etc on reddit? You're in a position to demand premium CPM
from advertisers and you're squandering the opportunity.

Right now the ad I see on the front page is "advertise on reddit". This is a
terribly wasteful use of remnant impressions, as 99% of your users won't be
interested in buying ads, and there is no reason to show them this ad. It will
take a few minutes to fill that remnant inventory with a reputable brand ad
from a display network.

I understand that you don't want to piss off your users with ads, but Digg
manages to generate revenue with strategically placed banner ads without any
outcry from users.

I think this problem isn't unique to reddit- it seems like a lot of startups
run exclusively by engineers have trouble monetizing intelligently, even when
they get significant traffic.

My email is my profile if you want to chat about this further, I can send some
links to the kinds of offers redditors might respond to or help you reach out
to media buyers who might be interested in doing large buys on sites like
reddit.

~~~
staunch
For another perspective from someone with experience: I'd say $500k is about
2-3x times higher than what's reasonable to expect, without a really good
direct sales.

~~~
il
You don't think throwing up a 300x250 banner on the front page from somewhere
like RightMedia could get a premium site like reddit $2 CPM? I bet even low
traffic quality sites like icanhazcheesburger or cracked are getting more than
$2 CPM.

By the way, reddit can really learn from Demand Media sites like Cracked, who
are very very good at monetizing the same type of low quality social media
traffic.

------
zach
I have to say, this looks bad for the whole "users first, revenue later"
mantra. Now, admittedly, the founders got paid on the flip. But there are
users, and now it's later, so... where is the revenue?

I heard this moment described as the "where is the land" moment. The crew has
been sailing the ocean for a long time and they're running on slim hope. They
grumble, then complain, and finally they confront the captain and say, "You
promised us land. Where is the land?!"

This doesn't look like a good resolution to the "where is the land" moment.
Why decide to plead for cash? It's the business model of last resort.

So yeah, this is definitely a cry for help. Unfortunately, it's one that
reminds me a lot of the drowning article. I think this is Reddit grabbing its
users and trying to climb on top of them.

~~~
nostrademons
I think this is the "revenue later" part.

~~~
zach
I strongly doubt it. I can't see a public-media-style "pledge week" as a
primary source of revenue for a for-profit company.

I think the best outcome would be that this is a one-time weird thing that
happened before they found a real revenue model. That wouldn't be
unprecedented at all, although every time I can think of, this happens
_before_ the founders sell to a large company who can monetize well. For
example, I donated to faqs.org when it was just some guy, and now it's owned
by some site aggregator I've never heard of. Which is fine with me, because I
just wanted to keep it around.

But assuming this works spectacularly, doesn't this just make Reddit
completely illiquid? How can you go about selling a company based on revenues
that are primarily free-will gifts? What would you sell, a share of profits
from people just giving the company money? And what would you tell your
donating customers who have zero ownership? Maybe that's all okay, or maybe I
don't get it -- is there some way for this to succeed that I'm missing here?

~~~
nostrademons
They're asking people to subscribe, not to donate. A subscription is a
recurring revenue stream.

~~~
zach
Yeah, I'm just probably not being imaginative enough. Even if you give someone
a tiny bit of status that says they're a member, that's what they're "paying
for," even if it costs nothing. And all the psychic benefits just happen to be
lurking behind that.

I just can't believe this is where you go to before exhausting everything
else, though. Just up and asking your customers to give you money like this
has got to change your relationship, just like lending or giving money to a
friend, right? I have to say I am fascinated to see how this plays out.

~~~
nostrademons
"Just up and asking your customers to give you money like this has got to
change your relationship, just like lending or giving money to a friend,
right?"

When taken out of context, that sounds remarkably absurd. ;-)

It's an interesting development, simply because most businesses throughout
history have _demanded_ that you give them money _before_ you receive service.
Or they bill you afterwards with the full force of law behind their threats.
Very few will give you the service first and then ask nicely for money.

I'm hoping that it works out, simply because if it doesn't, I'd bet that we
won't see very many businesses using this strategy in the future. OTOH, I have
no plans to subscribe - Reddit just isn't worth all that much to me.

~~~
zach
Yeah, I needed to weasel-ify it some more so it was clear I was talking about
outright giving instead of giving in an exchange -- I probably should have
just called it "donating" consistently. :)

The thing that's interesting is that they're clearly willing to go for the
donation angle. Again, the line is so thin that you wonder why they don't just
announce they're selling you a digital doodad for an inflated price with the
understanding that it's essentially a donation. It's something that works for
PBS selling $100 DVDs but maybe the worry is that it triggers the "outrageous
price" receptor...

------
city41
I think if any site could pull this off, Reddit could. Somehow, somewhere,
someway, Reddit became a social news site that has a strong sense of community
to it. Redditors feel good being "Redditors", and feel an affinity towards the
site. My prediction is this actually works.

~~~
blhack
I would love it if totalfarke...(err, I mean, "reddit gold members") also got
labeled (perhaps after a review by a mod or something) as "definitely not
spammers".

Just today I was being told to wait 10 minutes between postings...even though
I'm definitely _not_ a spammer, and have very positive karma (2000 after about
3 months).

Personally, I would pay $5/mo for premium reddit.

~~~
nostromo
This sounds like a great way to make money, but a terrible way to prevent
spam.

~~~
ilovecomputers
Well how did Metafilter end up with paid membership?

~~~
jrockway
Metafilter finds unique articles, but the comments are terrible. Non-threaded
comment sections only work for 4chan.

~~~
ilovecomputers
Well the community there has adapted to that particular comment layout. They
also favor long and rich comments since they are a community of writers, which
reflects the comment layouts, if I'm not mistaken.

------
swilliams
It's good that they're seeking ways to increase revenue, but this comes across
as nearly cyber-begging.

"...we can right now only offer you our undying gratitude and an optional
trophy on your userpage."

Yikes. What else could reddit offer for subscribers other than a png?

Can reddit or similar platforms find a good way to generate revenue? Obviously
ads and merchandise (t-shirts, etc) aren't doing it alone here.

~~~
EvilTrout
There are tons of sites where people can (and do!) pay money for a simple PNG.

I'd know: my web based MMO, Forumwarz is one. People can pay to buy some kinds
of "E-Peen" which is our version of badges.

~~~
famfam
Nice game. I logged in to play it a bit. I'd love to hear how the game is
doing for you (e.g. paying for itself, ramen profitable, ferrari profitable).
I'm actually in the middle of developing a browser based "MMO" myself right
now. (Nothing deployed yet.)

~~~
EvilTrout
I worked on Forumwarz for about 3.5 years full time, although my salary was
far from glamorous. I'd say I was eating a lot better than ramen though :)

It was amazing experience that I wouldn't trade for anything, and I met so
many amazing people and learned a lot, but eventually I realized that earning
half of what I was capable of earning as a developer wasn't a good idea in the
long term.

I now maintain the site on a part time basis along with a half dozen
volunteers. The site still pays its operating costs but there isn't too much
left over.

My goal is to run the site as long as possible, which is a lot more affordable
now that it isn't doing 40M pageviews a month.

------
moultano
Every company/product with a strong community and few employees that I've seen
try this has worked massively well.

<http://unknownworlds.com/> is a great example. When it was still just a
halflife mod, and the creator wanted to work on it full time while
bootstrapping the company, he asked for donations to get a special icon in
game and playtesting access. There was an incredible outpouring of support and
it kept them in the green.

Now, to fund the stand-alone sequel, they are taking preorders far in advance
to help the development, with an option to pay $20 extra for the game to get
special black armor in-game and their eternal gratitude. Almost all of the
preorders opted to pay extra, mostly out of thanks for the years they spent
playing the first game for free.

~~~
MicahWedemeyer
I can definitely see it working in "help the little guy" situations, but I'm
much less skeptical that people will open their wallets when the little guy is
backed by a mega-corporation.

------
davidw
I don't know, I think paying money for nothing in return to a big corporation
is a little bit insane, actually. $5, in the right hands, would go a long ways
in Africa or various other places in the world where people have real, urgent
needs. Or if that's not your thing, there are all kinds of real charities out
there. Hell, if you want, you can send the money my way and I'll put it in my
daughter's college education/future fund. She's even cuter than the reddit
alien and doesn't have such extremist political views ("pacifiers for all!" is
probably the most controversial).

Joking aside, I think there are a lot of people in Africa, Haiti and, sadly,
many other places in the world, who would get a lot more out of a few dollars
than my daughter, who will hopefully never experience anything like the sort
of privation many people see every day there.

~~~
zyb09
ah yeah good ol' "but Africa" reasoning. You can apply that logic to almost
everything. Sorry but why don't you return your freshly bought iPhone and
donate the money to charity's? And do you really need a car, can't you ride
your bike? Do we really need Reddit if we could buy food in Africa instead?

Maybe that's a little harsh, but we spend money EVERY friggn day on things
that could be invested in Africas problems. Making this point leads to nowhere
and Africa's problems are far more complex anyway. There's defiantly nothing
wrong in donating a few bucks to Reddit.

(also pacifism is neither extreme nor wrong)

~~~
JoeAltmaier
...and the lamest thing is, it wasn't your last $5, right? So why aren't you
sending money to Africa anyway?

------
vaksel
280 million page views a month and they aren't breaking even to support 4
engineers? wtf

~~~
axod
They have a userbase which is ridiculously hard to monetize (IMHO). I'd bet
the % of adblock users on Reddit is way higher than the average. The Reddit
crowd aren't your average mainstream user. It's a particular crowd (liberal
anti-capitalism pro-cannabis etc etc) [Again, just my opinion]

Also they really have very few adverts at all on the site, and those that are
there, are tucked away not very noticable.

Say you get an eCPM of $0.05 or something (A guess for that sort of site so I
may be way off)... That'd work out to $14k/month in ad revenue for 280m
pageviews.

~~~
ErrantX
_I'd bet the % of adblock users on Reddit is way higher than the average._

So, actually, this could be an interesting experiment - the ad blockers slogan
is often "I prefer to subscribe".

I hope it works out that way for them!

~~~
thaumaturgy
Subscriptions are a funny thing. But first, I'm an AdBlock user, and I
recommend it for my clients (<http://www.robsheldon.com/adblockplus>).

If Reddit immediately offered a subscription service and changed nothing else
about their site ... I probably wouldn't subscribe at any price. Reddit is a
bit of an occasional guilty pleasure for me, and if it went away, I would
write that off as one less distraction. I'm aware that Redditors on the whole
have accomplished some pretty great things in their own right, so something
like that _ought_ to exist, but I just couldn't justify the cost to me.

BUT! If Reddit _required_ a paid subscription in order to post a comment or
story, I would actually be _more_ motivated to spend money on that. It would
dramatically change the nature of the site, into one that I think would be
more attractive -- to me.

That's just me though, and I'm not a very good example of any kind of business
model. ;-) (Nor do I think Reddit actually should do this -- it would be a bad
business move.)

------
brianwillis
I gladly forked over $10.

I can't remember who I'm quoting here, but it comes from someone in the
Voluntary Simplicity movement and it really struck a chord with me:

>With your money you get to chose what exists in the world.

It's one of the the last truly democratic forms of voting. In some ways,
consumerism is an unriggable election, with the market deciding (for better or
worse - sometimes worse) what is allowed to thrive and what dies.

A few people have expressed the opinion that because Reddit is owned by a
large corporation, that asking for donations is unjustified. The way I see it,
they're creating value, and have a right to ask for payment for that. In
exchange for your dollars, you get to see a great community continue existing
in the world.

------
avar
According to this talk they're paying around $250k/year for server hosting at
EC2: <http://pycon.blip.tv/file/3257303/>

See the question at around ~27m into the video.

~~~
axod
WTH are they using EC2 (One of the most expensive hosts around)?

~~~
shawndrost
Can't find a link for this, but one of the employees mentioned that it was
related to Conde Nast's arcane rules about buying and managing servers.

~~~
jedberg
It has nothing to do with that.

It is simply that EC2 offers us the best bang for the buck for our
requirements (one of the main ones being able to spin up a lot of iron very
quickly).

~~~
tb
May I ask why you don't use another cheaper provider for fixed base load and
reserve EC2 for peak load capacity? Is it that the overhead of running on two
different providers not worth the money you'd save? Or is this something
you've considered doing but haven't had the time to implement yet?

~~~
jedberg
> Is it that the overhead of running on two different providers not worth the
> money you'd save? Or is this something you've considered doing but haven't
> had the time to implement yet?

Pretty much yes to both of these. With so few of us, the overhead of running
it and moving to it just doesn't make sense at this time.

~~~
kwyjibo
You don't seem to really trying. You could be moving everything to one host
and still be saving money.

------
jamesshamenski
Conde Nast looks like a bunch of chumps right now. I doubt Mike Raldi will
last longer than a year if he has to raise funds in this way.

~~~
nir
To be blunt (we are talking Reddit..) Conde Nast were chumps when they allowed
Chris Anderson, high on his own supply, convince them to buy Reddit for its
supposed "Long Tail News" value.

Now they're chumps for not putting a grown up in charge of converting 280
million page views/month and a dedicated community to enough money to support
4 engineers and a bunch of servers.

The comparison to Gruber etc is misleading, since Gruber never got bought by a
major company. This is more like 30 Rock asking you to donate to NBC.

~~~
keysersosa
> Conde Nast were chumps when they allowed Chris Anderson, high on his own
> supply, convince them to buy Reddit for its supposed "Long Tail News" value.

That's not how it happened.

> Now they're chumps for not putting a grown up in charge

I _like_ to think of myself as a grown up.

> converting 280 million page views/month and a dedicated community to enough
> money to support 4 engineers and a bunch of servers.

This is the crux of the problem. Marketing and ad sales is out of our direct
control and has been lacking, so we've had to resort to other options. Self
serve advertising last year was one of them, and it has done us well. This is
more extreme for sure, but our plan is to eventually go towards the optional
subscription model (like Ars Technica or Fark).

~~~
nir
>That's not how it happened.

Granted, you know better than me.

>I like to think of myself as a grown up

By "grown up" I just mean someone experienced with running the business side.
I wouldn't call myself "a grown up" either in that sense, having never done
that.

> Marketing and ad sales is out of our direct control and has been lacking

Sorry to hear that. Seems like a common story for startups. I think you guys
could do well with a paid model like Metafilter's.

------
petercooper
They could accept advertisers from outside the US without using some bizarre
legal argument I've never heard from any other company.

~~~
jedberg
The legal argument isn't that bizarre. :)

Our lawyers fear foreign laws and will not deal with them.

That being said, we are working on expanding into some of the other English
speaking countries.

~~~
petercooper
It's bizarre in the sense that it's a _rare_ problem. I can approach any of a
million US sites, give them some money, and put an ad on their site. I can
head over to <http://buysellads.com/> and do that right now.

Being subjected to foreign laws can't be a huge concern, surely. Contracts for
advertising (and, heck, almost any online service) specify the legal
jurisdiction that applies to the transaction. If I live in Kazakhstan, buy
some ads on a US site, there's not much I can do if I agreed to a US-based
contract whether Reddit breaks Kazakhstani law or not.

~~~
jedberg
The problem is that we aren't just selling ad space. We are running what might
be considered an "auction" in some jurisdictions (it isn't in the United
States), and that is what the lawyers fear. They want to make sure we won't
get dinged for running an illegal auction.

~~~
petercooper
Interesting. I hadn't seen that explanation before. Upboated :-) Now I just
hope that the UK is one of those English speaking jurisdictions or I'll be
resorting to the tried and tested "pay someone in the US to run the ad for me"
technique.

------
rufugee
I'm not sure what the problems are, and I agree with others' sentiment that
they need to focus on business and advertising. Still, as someone who in the
last few years has bought into the Rails explanation of scaling ( _sure, ruby
is slow, but you can scale horizontally with more servers after you're sold
and have bajillions to spend_ ), I wonder if this is a bad sign for startups
using dynamic languages.

I've played around with www.playframework.org, and in my tests it was a LOT
faster than ruby, while offering many of the same benefits as Rails. I know
Reddit is written in Python with Pylons, but I wonder if all those CPU cycles
they sacrificed by using Python instead of Java wouldn't come in handy now?

~~~
starkfist
Yeah, the trick about that is that servers aren't really as cheap as everyone
says. Also, with horizontal scaling you spend more money elsewhere: on stuff
the programmers usually don't know shit about, like big-iron loadbalancers,
and on systems administration. So when someone says "hardware is cheap,
programmers are expensive" be aware that they are forgetting about systems
administrators who are often more expensive than programmers.

I was recently involved with a project where we were able to reduce our server
costs by an order of magnitude by switching from ruby to java.

~~~
brunoc
I'd love to hear more about this ruby -> java transition if you're willing to
share.

~~~
code_duck
Generally, the steps are

1> rewrite your Ruby code in Java

~~~
starkfist
Yeah, what he said... sort of. First we tried just smushing everything into
JRuby, but that was a mess. We then split the app into a bunch of services,
instead of one monolithic rails beast. Each new service is a simple java app.
It was a gradual process, taking about 7 months.

~~~
code_duck
Admittedly, my list was a little short on specifics.

------
koenbok
FYI, we tried to buy a self serve Reddit ad a month ago but it wouldn't accept
any of our cards. Tried to contact you guys but never heard anything back. No
hard feelings, we just went with other advertising.

But if this happens more then incidentally then you guys could easily be
missing out on multiple 1k/month advertising deals by not offering a way to
contact someone on the team.

------
leftnode
Do what incredibly successful SomethingAwful does: it's pretty much free to
browse and read (but saturated with ads) or you can pay $10 for life, and rid
yourself of most ads and post content.

It removes 99% of the shitheads and creates a great community. You can also
buy upgrades like an avatar, no-ads, a custom title, personal messages, etc.

~~~
qwzybug
SA also wields the banhammer with wild abandon. For people who don't toe the
line, the $10 turns into a subscription. The army of mods needed to keep the
revolving door going is large, but I think they like their jobs.

Unfortunately the last several years of SA have revealed that this model
doesn't really scale either, at least with regards to maintaining a vibrant
community and avoiding the Digg effect. I think they should have started
raising the rates about 2004.

------
adammichaelc
What I would do... Tier 1: $36 a year to get rid of ads and get a silver badge
Tier 2: $72 a year to get rid of ads and get a gold badge and be mentioned on
a "featured supporters" page Tier 3: $144 a year to get all of the above
(except make it a platinum badge) and become a "platinum-supporter," which
would entitle you to discounts to Conde Naste events, pulications, etc. Conde
Naste owns Wired, the New Yorker, etc, so the discounts could be pretty cool
with a bit of creativity.

------
run4yourlives
I don't want to kick someone when they are down, but this just stood out to
me:

 _And reddit's revenue isn't great. The good news is, our traffic continues to
grow by leaps and bounds._

Talk about doing it wrong.

When you have growth but no revenue, it's probably because you aren't asking
your users to pay. That should be every website's first option - ask people to
pay for the service they receive.

Paying users are great, un-paying users are a liability.

~~~
axod
Paying users aren't the only way. Reddit could have started at the outset with
adverts. They could have made that decision early on that they were going to
generate revenue. But they didn't - which is why Reddit has attracted the sort
of demographic that don't click on ads.

~~~
zach
A very good point -- the characteristics of a website's community is
determined usually well before, and only rarely after, its point of big
growth. Reddit definitely ended up with, um, less-monetizable DNA, and didn't
want to "sell out," so that characteristic never changed.

It's also a good illustration of what Joe Kraus said in his brilliant Startup
School speech -- when you put your product into beta, put your business model
into beta at the same time.

They could at least make their ad display scripts deposit tokens for the user
via async requests, and throttle users who run out of them. It's a better way
of thanking me for not running AdBlock than a PNG of the alien giving me the
thumbs up.

------
rdl
Is there any actual synergy at all with the rest of Conde Nast? Would it make
sense for Reddit to work with some P.E. people to buy themselves out, and make
a venture investment in improving the site?

~~~
JabavuAdams
Why would anyone make a venture investment in some guys who just admitted that
they can't think of how to make money on 280M uniques?

Reddit was (perhaps not intentionally) built to flip. Mission accomplished.

~~~
rdl
Invest in the 280M uniques, not in the guys. Put the "Francis M. H. White of
Monetization" in as CEO, let the founders be involved in other roles (they're
great at building a community and at "ghetto" engineering).

That it is weak sauce now just means you could buy it cheaper. If I had
$5-10mm (+100% debt) sitting around and nothing better to do with my life for
2-4 years, I'd be seriously tempted to make an offer to Conde Nast.

------
drawkbox
It will have to be many pieces not just a subscription...having to be careful
though for the community, so create more...

\- reddit game site with reddit comments and upvoting integrated into the site
like kongregate, game sites can pull in some better revenue (indie game
competitions, stats, leaderboards etc).

\- reddit book or movie club where you take the revenue of the amazon lead or
other store leads.

\- make money off the porn communities, tier the submission process (lots of
great companies get some funding from porn and noone will complain here).

\- prominent donation link or pay it forward like flattr.

\- deals for sponsorship such as takeovers on subreddits for movies, games,
etc.

\- deals for reddit flash mobs for buying a product or service at once or with
code (queue people ready to buy a product, then find a retailer ready to give
10% off for redditors - could work with book/movie clubs above and digital
goods like steam games).

\- ...

If you can relate everything back to your core feature (awesome community)
then it may just work.

------
lvecsey
Can any savings be had by committing to a data center instead of paying the
amazon hosting rates? I fear if they're at yet another crunch point, the next
one will be too much. Granted the pressure to "do more with less" is always
there, but something has to give.

~~~
jedberg
We actually moved from a datacenter to EC2. The problem is we all live in the
Bay Area, where data centers cost a lot of money. We can't afford to hire a
hand on person in a cheap place, so it turns out EC2 (and other cloud
solutions) are just cheaper.

Also, one thing that is nice with EC2 is that we can spin up a lot of big iron
when we need to absorb new kinds of traffic. I can't do that in my own
datacenter.

------
jcnnghm
With the number of page views you all are getting, why don't you bring on a
developer on a commission basis to really focus on driving revenue. I'm sure
you can find an ambition, business minded developer that you could give a
percentage of the increase in revenue to, who would be willing to work for
free to get things going. There is definitely money being left on the table,
and structuring it in this way could allow you to avoid getting shot down by
the people in charge, while bringing in more people, and increasing the
revenue, which will ultimately allow you all to increase the operating budget.

I'd definitely be interested in something like this, and I'm sure many other
people would be too.

------
pier0
"Corporations aren't run like charities", but apparently they don't mind
asking for some.

------
coryl
This models works: Fark has had premium users for a while now.

------
nphase
Here's a silly/naive suggestion from someone who only casually visits reddit
(read: not often to know exactly what is causing the downtime): why not make
the source code behind the more problematic functions available and let us
make suggestions? If not source code, then detailed descriptions?

I'd be interested in helping optimize your pain points, as I'm sure many here
and on reddit are. Yes, you'll get quite a ton of trash from people who have
no clue by doing this, but maybe you'll get some smart pointers in a way that
doesn't require you to get a new engineer spun up in six months (which, IMHO,
seems far too long for a web product)

~~~
lambda
You do realize the Reddit source code is available, right?
<http://code.reddit.com/>

~~~
nphase
Ha! I do now. Awesome.

------
benologist
I paid. I love reddit.

------
kloncks
Similar to what Gruber does to live. I like it.

~~~
scorpion032
What does he? Ask users to pay for seeing daringfireball without ads?

------
alexqgb
What value, if any, can information from Reddit be used by Conde Nast to drive
their larger business (i.e. selling ads)?

Not knowing anything about the deal (but knowing a bit about Conde's general
disdain for the web) I'm still surprised that your biggest problem is an ad-
sales framework.

At the same time, I always assumed that Reddit was one of the most future-
forward components in Conde's portfolio, and that it could provide as much if
not more intelligence value to its owners than it could via direct revenue.

This are totally off the cuff responses. I could easily be wrong about
everything.

------
endlessvoid94
<http://www.Flattr.com>

------
scorpion032
Move to AppEngine. Seriously. I know the pain these guys are going thro sys-
admin-ing the system.

The memcache clears out, The cassandra's fail, the fault reporting system
breaks. The new twitter fail whale. Let the pros do the sys admin thing.

Like Ted Zuiba says it, it not that they are not intelligent, the kind of
problems that occur at large scales, they just don't have enough experience to
know, anticipate and have preventive measures in place.

They should really talk to Google, to move their data on to the Bigtable and
work on adding features.

------
axod
lipstick.com was always going to be far easier to monetize.

(The site Reddit made for Conde Naste before they bought Reddit).

Celebs? Gossip? Woman demographics? non techie? Jeez you'd have been able to
make millions...

[http://web.archive.org/web/20071025012630/http://lipstick.co...](http://web.archive.org/web/20071025012630/http://lipstick.com/)

The site seems to have been killed and not used since 2007. Stupidly bad
decision IMHO.

Even if you stuck up a crappy website on that domain and just sold lipstick
it'd probably pay to run Reddit.

~~~
_pi
To be honest Reddit isn't that techie anymore, reddit's demographics have
shifted to teenage and young adult males and girls who are "geeks". Not only
that but the default reddits are becoming a cesspool like Digg. Essentially
the community had so much Digg hate in the beginning but at least Kevin Rose
kept his site running while the demographics shifted.

~~~
axod
Sure, I think their demographic has shifted away from techie. Now it's anti-
consumerist adblock loving pot smokin' gay marriage loving liberals.

~~~
_pi
I think the rise of humanistic interest sub-reddits with a low knowledge entry
barrier killed it.

------
ziadbc
Reddit is very loyal to its userbase, but isn't moderating them too much.
Thus, it is becoming hard to market toward them because there isn't an easy in
for someone offering products. Either they need to shape their audience more,
or figure out the right types of products (these may not even exist yet, but
I'm sure there are plenty of things redditors want that don't yet exist) I
would also look at what people are giving for arbitrary day as an idea for
advertisers.

------
nhnifong
Reddit I will pay you whatever it takes to keep those nasty adds off of your
website. Please do not sell our attention to people who do not deserve it.

------
bryanh
Why not create a sub-community for subscribers only? I mean, normal users see
subscriber and normal users posts but subscribers optionally only see other
subscribers. Maybe this would create a tighter knit, higher quality group. As
beaten as this dead horse is, we all know Reddit is infected with memes and
nonsense galore, that's why many of use have graduated to HN.

------
barredo
Someone mentioned give free @reddit.com email addresses (even if not a full
mailbox, just a redirect or alias to other email account).

I will pay for that.

------
exit
make expenses completely transparent (+hosting +salaries -advertising).
prominently display this per-month quota as some kind of health-bar, and next
to that a payment button. if the health-bar drops below x%, the rest of the
site disappears. there is no profit in this model. let the users finance their
own addiction.

~~~
thinkalone
I'd love to see the "health-bar" implemented - reddit is absurdly secretive
about what is going wrong behind the scenes and seemingly unwilling to allow
users to help. The site has suffered for lack of transparency and community
management.

------
pclark
$2 / mo: reddit gold badge

$6 / mo: + reddit.com email redirector

$12 / mo: reddit username appears in different colour on pages.

asking for one off donations isn't a business, you want predictable revenues.
I'd pay $12/mo for reddit.

I think Reddit should contact a PE firm and do a buy out. They can't monetize
because they don't have the resources.

------
DotSauce
Brilliant tactic encouraging members to set their own donation amount. I
imagine Reddit will receive significantly more donations and overall totals
than had they set donation structure.

------
jessriedel
A user's willingness to pay is going to be based either off of charity (a la
NPR) or as an exchange for a service/good. You can't have both, simply due to
human nature.

~~~
pavs
You don't know reddit community. They will gladly pay monthly fee (which is
not forced) just to get a gold icon on their "Trophy case". Its not because
Reddit users has more expendable expenses compare to other online communities
its because reddit community is more "involved" than other online community I
have ever seen.

Just compare reddit charity to Haiti fund and Digg doing the same thing.

Reddit:
[http://dri.convio.net/site/TR?pg=fund&fr_id=1030&pxf...](http://dri.convio.net/site/TR?pg=fund&fr_id=1030&pxfid=1511)

Digg:
[http://dri.convio.net/site/TR?pg=fund&fr_id=1030&pxf...](http://dri.convio.net/site/TR?pg=fund&fr_id=1030&pxfid=1910)

They both promoted it, they both blogged it in their official company blog.
Kevin rose personally tweeted it to his 1million+ followers. And they got 4k
measly dollars and Reddit got $185k, albeit reddit started few weeks sooner,
but still....

I am not trying to make a reddit > digg derpity derpity derp argument, I am
just saying that people greatly underestimate the power of "involved"
community. Not a community by page views numbers ala Digg.

~~~
potatolicious
Reddit is the only online community I've ever been in where I've met and
befriended fellow members in real life; I've been online for a fair while.

There's a connectedness there that simply does not exist for most online
communities. Hell, I go to a weekly board games and hang-out night with fellow
redditors in the area - no other internet community has ever compelled me to
do that before.

------
c1sc0
Open up self-serve ads for the rest of the world? I wanted to buy ads but I
couldn't because reddit is not processing non-US credit cards.

------
asimjalis
"Our four engineers are working full time just to keep things going. Perhaps
we're doing it wrong: there might be ways to optimize our code, or
technologies that could allow us to work more efficiently, but we're too busy
to investigate these things, or to migrate to the ones that look promising. It
becomes a vicious cycle."

If Reddit had not abandoned Lisp for Python, could the team have dodged this
vicious cycle?

~~~
tomjen3
No, not the way they where doing it.

Today you can choose between Clozure lisp or Clojure, both of which runs the
same on the different platforms and both of which are free.

Back then, the only way they could have pulled it of would be to use something
like Lispworks or Franz lisp, both of which are super nice technologies that
would be awesome to work with but they are also extreemly expensive (and I
have no idea how they scale).

------
rms
I gave them $5.

------
clistctrl
Let me pay $10, and all I ask for in return is site stability and maybe a
sweet icon next to my name when I comment. Honestly I bet you could get 100k
subscribers within a week. People are hopelessly addicted to these aggregation
services, and if subscribing gives us the self assurance that their be around
for us to continue enjoying them the fee is worth it. I don't expect you to
remove the sponsored ads either (actually i'd be a bit disappointed if you
did... its nice seeing ads for small businesses I haven't heard about)

A few downsides, once you start charging me I'm going to gain some
expectations. Downtime is going to be harder to excuse then it was before is
just one example.

~~~
jedberg
> once you start charging me I'm going to gain some expectations. Downtime is
> going to be harder to excuse then it was before is just one example.

One of the main reasons we hesitated so long. We didn't want to let down the
community, especially those that paid.

As always, we will do our best to keep the site up, and hopefully this new
income will make it so we can afford the redundant servers we need to do a
better job at it.

~~~
silverlake
Can't you find interns to help you with stability? Even I would help for free
just to get some experience with a very large site.

~~~
jedberg
Each time we've had a new programmer come on board, it takes about 6 months
for them to become familiar enough with the code to make a solid contribution.
In the mean time, it actually slows us down a bit.

That was the main reason we didn't seek programming interns this summer --
it's a great thought, but would probably take too long to ramp them up.

~~~
ritonlajoie
Hi jedberg,

First of all, thanks for your hard work on reddit. I'm myself quite addicted
to some interesting subreddits for about 6 months.

I would like to answer on your issue with the 6 months problem that interns
'would have' if you pick one. If I'm right, you released a virtual machine
with reddit installed, last month, on a blog post. I see no reason for _any_
intern for not being able to contribute to reddit from day 1.

Seriously, /r/programming and /r/coding are great, and I'm 110% sure you can
find an intern which would know perfectly how reddit works (code related) and
who would be very kind to help out.

This virtual machine already setup was a great idea, why not using it to your
own goal ?

edit: s/internet/intern

------
hotmind
Reddit is user generated content. Without the users, who are the readers and
contributers, Reddit wouldn't even exist. And yet they want subscription fees
from the very users who carry the website?

Reddit have ads plastered prominently on the site, Reddit TV, a 99 cent app, I
assume merch (correct me if I'm wrong), free user generated content from a
massive hardcore following, and millions of pageviews a day (too lazy to look
up the exact number) - and yet they still can't make a go of it?

If so, that does not bode well for the rest of us.

------
TheSOB88
The problem is twofold: Adblock being used by many of the users, and half the
ads when you're not are self-ads that sell nothing.

------
binspace
Get rid of downvoting (to fight the pervasive groupthink) and I'll consider
joining reddit again.

~~~
mclin
Huge urge to downvote this comment...

~~~
binspace
Why, because you disagree with it?

~~~
mclin
Irony...

~~~
binspace
Aah ;-)

