It’s easy to hate on deals of the Conde Nast-Reddit variety. When a big traditional publisher snaps up a website with no clear strategy in mind — or at least no strategy made public — it begs more questions than it answers. What does an old-line company who excels at matching blue-chip advertisers with its gorgeous, glossy tomes want with a Digg-like site where readers suggest headlines and then are voted up or down by peers in the community? (Sample: “Do periods attract bears? Can they really smell the menstruation?”)
How Reddit fits into Conde’s future wasn’t obvious when the deal was done in 2006 and it’s less so now, what with Reddit asking for money from its community. It’s sad to see a site with such a strong community reduced to groveling for more funds to hire enough engineers to basically keep the site up and add some features. There are lessons here for those who still look at big traffic figures — and with 280 million views a month, Reddit pulls a ton — and assume that audience alone will prop up a business.
Here are a few things a ton of traffic won’t fix:
1. No revenue. Ok, This is a bit chicken-and eggy. In most cases, audience is the first step towards making a content outfit some money, but without any scratch a mature site like Reddit isn’t going to be a favorite of corporate overlords. That’s essentially Reddit’s explanation of what’s going on and it seems straightforward. As the Ning saga recently demonstrated, the days of tossing around big numbers of uniqiue visitors or page views as though they themselves indicated the health of a business have come and gone. Less simple is who to blame or where to go from here.
2. No clear path to real revenue. I’m not a regular Reddit user and I may be missing something, but it seems that the main way the site makes money is a little ad unit tucked into the right rail. This morning, it featured a house ad soliciting advertising. That’s unacceptable for an operation with the consumer traction Reddit has — even just from the advertising perspective. As a heavily-trafficked platform whose main laborers are its readers, Reddit should scale. Helping it do so, you would think, should have been job number-one for Conde.
