Reddit Rides The Wave

This is Reddit's entire office. We're on the corner of Thur and Bryant's in San Francisco with a great view of the Bay Bridge ramp. It's great at five o' clock in here. And we have David King, who's one of our programmers, Mike Schereldi and Jeremy Edberg. Jeremy is our assisted man and Mike's another one of our programmers.

It may not look like much. In fact, Reddit's SF headquarters is just a small room in Wired's office. But this is Reddit's command center. The arrival of Digg is enjoying a huge surge in traffic in the wake of Digg's controversial redesign. We talked to senior programmer Chris Lowe to get some numbers on traffic money and how they're learning from Diggs mistakes.

We've seen a growth from about 11 million to 13, 14 million impressions a day, and our uniques are up from about 600,000 to 900,000. So we're seeing between a 30 and a 40 bump across the board. And it looks like when we look at referrers, we're getting about something like 20% refers from Digg right now. Mostly because for the last couple days there's been periods where 7 out of 10 of the top 10 dig posts have been to Reddit.com? we have a publisher account like most publishers, and it just so happens that diggers are voting up. Diggers are digging Reddit content.

So when did you realize that something was different in traffic? When was the inflection point? Over the past week.

So we start seeing our Monday traffic on Sunday night when basically everybody in Australia and East Asia wake up. And so what happened was that on Sunday night at around like 8 or 9 o', clock, we started seeing traffic is actually higher than what we normally see during the week. And that's unusual. It usually goes up by a bit. And you know, all respect to our Australian Redditors, but they're usually small. And so it was clear something was up. And then by Monday morning, we were seeing midday traffic before it was even 9 o' clock in the morning. And actually at the time we had one web server, it was starting to get overloaded and we had to actually bring out a second one to take up some of the load.

And that growth has pretty much maintained throughout this week. Right. So you saw the pop on roughly Monday, and that was about 850, 900k uniques. And then what happened on Tuesday?

Wednesday going On Tuesday was 900 and yesterday was another eight something. And our pages have Been pretty consistent too. Like we've been sitting between 13 and 14 million, which is up from about 10.

What was your impression of Diggs relaunch?

I think that those guys are really smart and I have to say that from a tech team side of things, we feel really bad to see them having having technical issues recently. We were thinking it was kind of like when the Russian submarine was sunk over the North Pole, the US was actually going to send in help. It's like, yeah, they're our rivals, but they're not really our enemies. We don't want to see them fail. And there's a space for both of us. And I think that historically we've always had slightly different bends on the way we treat content and the way we treat our communities. And so they have to plot their own course and we just hate to see relaunches give them this much trouble.

Where do you think they went wrong?

I think the biggest complaint from their community has been that they feel marginalized. The additional publisher feeds basically means that submission to dig isn't really important anymore, or at least it's not as front and center as it was. And I think that their community feels a little slighted by that. I also think that the only advice I would ever give them, I think they're doing a great job, which is that they haven't been as communicative as they could be. And I think one of the things we do try to do is we try to really tell our community what we're doing at all times. And our only currency really is trust and candor. And so if you treat your community like adults, they'll behave like adults. And I think that right now the diggers can be a little childish at times, or at least they're taking it very personally when they shouldn't necessarily. I mean, the content hasn't degraded for sure. I mean, there's still great stuff on the front pages. They feel like they've been sliding.

When it comes to numbers, it's very clear from what you've told us that the numbers from traffic are way up. But what about the numbers when it comes to your bottom line, the money, right? What have you seen in terms of a pickup or any pickup at all for your subscription rates or your ad sales? Anything along those lines?

Yeah, we've seen one of the funny things about it the way we do, we have self service advertising and we now have a real discount going on because all of a sudden the number of impressions get zero up in a day is up. And so We've seen about a 30% bump in sales in that regard, too. Another thing was one of the reasons why we were able to actually deal with the traffic without breaking was we were able to take the proceeds from our subscription service and sort of funnel that into servers and capacity. And so we hadn't really even tested that until all of a sudden Monday morning, we were able to check and see if that actually worked. And it did, amazingly enough. And so we put in a little shameless plug in our blog mentioning that. Oh yeah, thank you, Gold subscribers. And here's a way to actually donate more. So there's been a fair uptick in that as well.

Given the launch of your gold label subscription service about mid July or so, and also now this increase in traffic, do you think you're going to be able to expand your staff and get the resources that you want? I mean, someone on Reddit staff wrote that blog post in July and it said, you know, clearly resources was an issue. Do you think that that's something that's going to improve in the next few months? Do you see kind of a light at the end of the tunnel when it comes to resources and new staff that you desperately need?

We do. And actually we've got an open hire right now. We put out a call actually, a couple weeks ago that was unrelated to any of this. We didn't know this was happening until it happens on Friday. And so we're actually currently looking through resumes to get another hire. And if that works out and if things continue in the direction they're going, I can see us asking for another hire in a few months and not having any trouble getting one.

Has someone at Conde Nast given you a pat on the back recently because of clearly all the attention this week and the traffic?

I think they think it's great. I think overall they've liked the way we've been handling it. And, you know, one of the things is we've been at this for a very long time, so how to deal with our own community. And so Conde Nast has been great in that they are mostly hands off. They don't want to squash us. They don't want us to march to some beat that might not fit us. And they're good at running magazines, they're good at running things that are on their own footing at all times. And I think it's continued so far. They're happy to see you succeed, of course. Makes them look good.

Yeah, of course they don't want to squash, but you guys had a Little bit of a, not a fight, but a lover's quarrel, you could say. So there was a Proposition 19 issue and you ran the ads without money because, you know, Conde Nast didn't want to financially reap any benefit from those ads. So what was the fallout from that? What was the reaction from Conde Nast once you, you went with that route?

Once the dust settled, everything's just fine, nobody's been fired, everyone is perfectly happy. And I think that the main problem was, is that it was all happening very fast and it went from a blog post from the Prop 19 guys to a full blown community revolt on Reddit in about an hour. And so we tried to respond as best we could. And one of the problems with trying to be candid at all times is that sometimes private political arguments end up public. And I think that's the only regret I have is that we really did. We could have been a little more graceful in our handling of that once it does fail. We also learned, in fact, that it's also, it's a slippery slope to be running free political ads on any website. So I think the next time around we'll be a little more careful. But all in all, things went pretty well.

Do you think Reddit works on under an organization like Conde Nast, or would it be better suited on its own? Or of course, ICANN has cheeseburgers offered to buy you guys? I mean, does it work?

I think it works, yeah. I think that, I guess you have to say, well, yeah, I think there's a lot of scenarios whereby there are plenty of companies I can think of that I won't name that could have bought us and squashed us, or if we were still privately held and we were taking Ron's venture. It's very easy to go down a path where your board gets too powerful and is out of touch with your user base and all of a sudden you're doing things that don't necessarily treat your users very well. I think that really one of the nice things about having Konias is that they are a media company. They do understand community management to some extent. It's not quite the same community management, but they're learning and we're trying to educate them as best as possible in the way the web works.

So my final question is, now that the spotlight is on you guys, right, it is a great opportunity to not only just kind of get all hands on deck to make sure you can scale upwards to support these large numbers, but to start rolling out some real features that will take it to the next level. Right. Then of course, you run the risk of turning into a Dig4 type launch and getting a revolt. So what is the next step for Reddit in terms of rolling out new features? Features? How do you plan to do that and how do you plan to make sure you don't make the same mistakes as dig?

Well, I think that we always try to put the community first and we always try to treat them like adults. And so everything we do, we always try to tell them why we're doing it and convince them that we're actually not trying to be evil and destroy them or sell their data to somebody else. One of the things we've been really bad at traditionally has been at new user engagement. Like, we don't. Our UI is not particularly user friendly, at least not initially. When you come to us and see this big wall of text, we'd like to work on some tools to make it a little bit friendlier, explain what's going on. When the revolt started happening, in fact, the first thing we did was we put up a post on the blog that was. We called it Reddit 101, which was a list of all the things that you can expect on Reddit and what the community expects is good behavior. We have this guide they call the Redikit guide of how to behave, how to deal with the community. What's considered a faux pas. And I think we'd like to do more of that in a more official stance as opposed to a blog post now and then. Another thing that's been big is it's not necessarily clear off the bat that Reddit is customizable. We have a whole bunch of communities and they all have different bends and you can subscribe to different communities, you can decide what your interests are and look at stuff that is in your interest. I think that's necessarily clear from a first look, and we really could benefit from a concerted effort to make that better.