<story><title>Reddit becomes reddit Inc.</title><url>http://blog.reddit.com/2011/09/independence.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>joshklein</author><text>The question for reddit isn&apos;t whether or not people enjoy it and want to spend time on it, but whether or not the owners can make money selling those people&apos;s attention. The traffic to reddit - while admirably large - is relatively unattractive to most advertisers.&lt;p&gt;&quot;Reach&quot; (impressions/eyeballs) are only important insofar as you&apos;re talking to someone who might buy what you&apos;re selling (see &quot;relevancy&quot;). The sub-reddit system could theoretically segment the audience in interesting ways, but other than r/gaming, there aren&apos;t many natural industry fits amongst popular sub-reddits.&lt;p&gt;Anecdotally, the audience would also seem to be advertisement-averse. An advertiser should be willing to pay network prices for the audience (i.e. pennies CPM), which makes it a nice living for a small group of folks living off their passion, but pretty useless to a Condé Nast trying to run a media empire.&lt;p&gt;I think the business model in a reddit-like site could be selling curated content in other media, e.g. a meme-series of coffee table books. Think Harry Potter, not Oprah.&lt;p&gt;If you&apos;re in the content game, your business&apos;s value is in having the attention of a group of people. Your first attempt to monetize that asset needn&apos;t be to sell your audience&apos;s attention to someone else, in this case undermining your ability to keep their attention. Instead, you should focus on bringing things your audience wants - and would pay for - to them. Sometimes that means you need to make the things they want to buy instead of shilling them for someone else, because no one sells what your people want.&lt;p&gt;Condé Nast isn&apos;t built to do this.</text></comment>
<story><title>Reddit becomes reddit Inc.</title><url>http://blog.reddit.com/2011/09/independence.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>thurn</author><text>Can someone with more business know-how tell me how a company like Condé Nast benefits from making Reddit an incorporated subsidiary? It doesn&apos;t sound like all that much is changing, honestly.</text></comment>