<story><title>Y Combinator Top Companies List 2019</title><url>https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>screye</author><text>I am surprised that reddit is on #13.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s alexa rank in US social media websites is #2 behind Facebook. Apart form their redesign shenanigans, people actually like the product they offer (in contrast to facebook) and they are still growing.&lt;p&gt;I wish Reddit stays in the kind of &amp;quot;grey&amp;quot; area where it never gets as &amp;quot;official&amp;quot; as twitter, despite the popularity. If anything, that might be entirely its appeal.&lt;p&gt;That predicament will eternally present a glass ceiling for reddit&amp;#x27;s revenue, but as a consumer I&amp;#x27;d rather see that than it going the full facebook -&amp;gt; hyper growth above anything else approach.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>krn</author><text>&amp;gt; I am surprised that reddit is on #13.&lt;p&gt;Reddit might be a #1 &lt;i&gt;project&lt;/i&gt; out of all the startups ever funded by Y Combinator, but it&amp;#x27;s unlikely to ever become a top 10 &lt;i&gt;company&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;Because as an ad business it can neither match Google at targeting audience by exact user intent, nor Facebook at targeting audience by exact user profile.&lt;p&gt;In fact, I see reddit more like Couchsurfing: a project which would do &lt;i&gt;much&lt;/i&gt; better as a foundation rather than a corporation, based on the role it plays in the society.&lt;p&gt;At its essence, it&amp;#x27;s a highly scalable CRUD application, which requires a simple user interface, respectful community moderation, and as little user tracking as possible.</text></comment>
<story><title>Y Combinator Top Companies List 2019</title><url>https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>screye</author><text>I am surprised that reddit is on #13.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s alexa rank in US social media websites is #2 behind Facebook. Apart form their redesign shenanigans, people actually like the product they offer (in contrast to facebook) and they are still growing.&lt;p&gt;I wish Reddit stays in the kind of &amp;quot;grey&amp;quot; area where it never gets as &amp;quot;official&amp;quot; as twitter, despite the popularity. If anything, that might be entirely its appeal.&lt;p&gt;That predicament will eternally present a glass ceiling for reddit&amp;#x27;s revenue, but as a consumer I&amp;#x27;d rather see that than it going the full facebook -&amp;gt; hyper growth above anything else approach.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cm2012</author><text>Reddit traffic converts much worse than FB traffic for advertisers at scale. This is because besides certain subreddits (which are very low scale relatively) the targeting is very weak. Unlike on FB where you can profitably target all sorts of sub groups.</text></comment>