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).
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.
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].
To me it seems obvious that Reddit's core userbase would not be willing to install the spyware that comScore piggybacks onto to acquire its data. It doesn't surprise me in the least that Reddit is consequently under-represented in comScore's numbers.
Comscore numbers vary wildly for sites that don't reconcile their numbers w/ comscore's. And only sites that publish rate cards for displa ads really do that.
I remember once when comscore reported that delicious had dropped to 44k uniques when we had millions of actives, much less uniques.
I think it depends on the kind of web-site you are running more than anything as to which metrics are important. Just like in finance, depending on the business model, different metrics are tracked (e.g. free cash flow, revenue, etc.). Plus, hardly ever is a single metric important. Sites will look at page views for new/existing visitors, bounce rates for new visitors, time on site, etc. depending on their goals.
What this tells you, though, is that if they are only seeing 1.1 million unique visitors a month that those visitors account for 1,000 page views a month which is a lot. And that's the average! I bet a lot of sites would love to have that number.
There are definitely more stats sites care about, but question number one from CPM ad buyers is universally "what are your uniques?" They care about the specific demographics of those uniques too, but when they're doing branding (vs conversion based advertising) they really care mostly about how many distinct sets of eyeballs they can address.
I would say showing your ad to more unique people vs the same person over and over again would be where the new value of Uniques comes into play; of course YMMV.
> The news in this blog post is fantastic! But it sounds like the money is coming from Gold subscribers, not CN.
I doubt gold money is sufficient to hire 4 persons. But revenue has one important property, which the admins explained last time around, and the one before: when they have revenue and growth to show, they can make inroad with CN. The last pair of hires were not self-funded, they were based on Reddit finally demonstrating a way to make money.
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.
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.
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.
I used to work for the internet arm of Condé in NYC in the mid aughts. The cafeteria was amazing; they'd have some big-deal chef in each week to work a lunch shift (though people would usually smoke instead of eating). The women there were also incredibly attractive -- it helped having Vogue in the same building. I have no idea what their San Francisco offices are like, but if they're anything like New York, it makes working there almost worth it. ...
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.
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.
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?
I find it amusing how many people still assume that a site with many page views somehow needs to have a big engineering team behind it.
Yes, 1 billion page views is a relatively serious load, technically. But there's not much difference between a small team building the software to handle it and a huge enterprise department doing the same.
In fact, the small team will often produce better results. When given enough motivation, money and coffee.
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.
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).