Now is the Time... to Invest in Gold. Yishan comments on Now is the Time... to Invest in Gold. Reddit CEO Asks Users To Buy Revamped Membership Because Ads Are “One Of The Reasons Digg Failed” “We could theoretically load up our pages with ads and probably make enough to cover our costs. However, that would significantly degrade the experience of using the site,” said Reddit CEO Yishan Wong in a post asking users to “Invest in Gold” — the site’s newly enhanced subscription program. If people pay for ad-free Reddit and new Gold features like filter saving, the site won’t end up like Digg.
Wong started his post to the Reddit blog by saying the site was booming, bringing in 3.8 billion page views and 46 million unique visitors in October. Press from events like President Obama’s “Ask Me Anything” as well as scandals like the violentacrez doxxing have upped awareness of Reddit. But all that traffic comes at a cost. So Reddit was faced with a choice. “See, the problem is that if your site is funded primarily with advertising, then you are beholden to your advertisers. If Wong and Moot’s pleas work, Reddit and 4Chan can continue to thrive without having to bow to advertisers.
Reddit takes a new direction. Several months ago, reddit shook with the news that longtime subreddit /r/jailbait — dedicated to, well, you can probably guess — had been shut down by its own moderators. Yesterday, reddit shook again, with the news that a variety of other subreddits, arranged on similar topical lines, were being shut down by reddit’s admins. Predictably, this has caused a shitstorm. It has also caused calls for bans of other subreddits which have nothing to do with sexual fetishes involving children. There are, of course, plenty of subreddits devoted to other deeply disturbing things, and as long as reddit’s getting rid of the kiddie diddlers, why not the Nazis and the wife-beaters too?
I am not going to get up on my soapbox here and defend or oppose anything; I’m simply going to talk a bit about this problem, and why it’s so damned hard. Reminiscences of an old fart First, a bit of background. It’s 2012, and I’ve been involved in user-run online communities for nearly fifteen years now. It never ends. New Reddit CEO. Hi everyone. My name is Yishan Wong, and this week I'm starting a new job. It turns out that this job is the CEO position at reddit. I've been a redditor since 2005 (yishan) and over the years, I've read blog posts about the ups and downs of the reddit team, the complaints about the limiting effects of being a wholly-owned subsidiary of a much larger company.
I sympathized with others (both inside and outside of reddit) who felt that reddit would be able to do better as an independent company. So, like many of you, I was quite happy last September to hear the news that reddit was being spun out into an independent entity. That announcement included the fact that reddit was looking for a CEO. I'd be lying if I said that it didn't immediately cross my mind to imagine what it would be like to do that job. At first, I didn't really quite believe I was a serious candidate. I've spent the past decade of my career learning skills important to startups. I'm here for reddit because I love it. Reddit nabs ex-Facebooker Yishan Wong as new CEO. The man balancing a shoe on his head in the photo above is the new CEO of community news sharing site Reddit, the company announced in a blog post today.
Wong admits that his background isn’t traditionally what company’s would look for when pursuing someone to fill the chief executive position. “I don’t have the polish and the poise and the schmoozing, and I don’t play golf. Instead, I’m an engineer and a leader of engineers and I play Starcraft (poorly),” Wong wrote on the company blog. “But as I continued the conversations, I came to understand that reddit wasn’t looking for a conventional CEO candidate, because reddit is not a conventional company.” Above: Yishan's Reddit Avatar For the first half of Reddit’s existence, the site managed to gain over a billion monthly page views on a miniscule budget with only 4 to 5 employees.
Despite the crazy metrics, Reddit remains pretty basic at its core. Photo via Yishan Wong Are you making or losing money with marketing automation? How reddit became reddit - the biggest smallest community online. Before I begin, let me reiterate that I left reddit over a year ago. Steve departed to enjoy married life (then to start hipmunk with Adam Goldstein, which I joined a week before launch) and I to Armenia to volunteer as a Kiva fellow. Since cutting the dead weight, the site has catupulted to a top 100 website and most recently broke 1,000,000,000 monthly pageviews. Steve Huffman & I started reddit in a rented apartment in Medford, MA. The two of us spent about a month sketching, debating, and finally building the first version of reddit, which went online June 23, 2005.
(I'm really happy I took all these screencaptures.) For the first few weeks after launching, aside from a few friends we begged into submitting to the site, most of the submitters were just me or Steve with different usernames. Our first breakthrough came a few weeks in when either Steve nor I had to do any submitting, we just used the site like any other redditor. Good luck, online community builders! Independence. Today reddit, a division of Condé Nast, becomes reddit Inc. This change is all about setting up reddit so that it can better handle future growth and opportunities. When reddit was acquired in October 2006 by Condé Nast, it was receiving about 700k page views per day. Now, reddit routinely gets that much traffic in 15 minutes.
This explosion in traffic created technical, cultural, and organizational growing pains. reddit now has the kind of resources it needs to continue improving and supporting the community's experience far into the future. reddit Inc. is now owned by Advance Publications (which also owns Condé Nast), so even though the organizational shift is important, reddit is not really going anywhere. reddit Inc. will report to a Board and therefore have much more operational freedom than when we were a division of Condé Nast.
As part of the new structure, reddit Inc. has also started the search for a CEO who can help us reach our full, unbridled potential.