While Reddit is often compared to Digg, the two sites have some key differences. Reddit has a simple interface and no advertising. Reddit rankings are based on an absolute vote (+1 for hot / -1 for cold), meaning a negative vote decreases a story's overall vote count as well as the 'karma score for the user who submitted the URL. I for one love this simplicity.
This week I look at Reddit, by the numbers:
The Beginning:
* Reddit was founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in 2005, then 22-year-old graduates of the University of Virginia.
* It received its initial funding, a $12,000 check from Paul Graham at Y Combinator.
* It took them all of 16 months to take their social news site from inception in June 2005 to acquisition by Wired and Conde Nast in October 2006.
The Traffic:
* Initial traffic was provided by referring traffic from Paul Grahams website to Reddit, resulting in 3,000 " 4,000 visitors per day upon launch
* Increased site traffic from 3,000 unique visitors per day to 170,000 unique visitors per day in just under 2 years
* Broke 1 million unique visitors in September 2006
* By of April 2007, Reddit is generating 170,000 unique visitors and 1.9M page views per day
* Less than 10% of Reddit traffic today comes from Google
* Reddit had a monthly growth last month of 35%
* Alexa Rank: 880
* Number of unique pages viewed per user per day for this site: 4.3
* 10% increase in percent of global Internet users who visit this site
The Demographics:
* Primarily 18-34 male. They love technology and politics
* Global reach:
U.S. 57.22%
Canada 6.29%
U.K 5.80%
Germany 2.51%
Australia 2.34%
* Reddit.com traffic rank in other countries:
U.S. 245
Canada 288
UK 357
Australia 387
India 503
* Where people go on Reddit.com:
reddit.com 84%
programming.reddit.com 5%
science.reddit.com 4%
entertainment.reddit.com 1%
nsfw.reddit.com 1%
Other websites 2%
The Financial's:
* $100,000 in total angel funding.
* At the time of acquisition Reddit was generating very little revenue - under $50,000 per month
* Web Speculation estimates Reddit sold for upwards of US $20 million
Did You Know:
* Reddit team was responsible for 80% of the submitted links for many months.
* Websites voted up to the frontpage can see over 10,000 visitors within the span of a day.
* Reddit is available in several languages including Armenian, Chinese, French, German, Russian and Spanish
I think it is fair to say that Reddits success has a lot to do with the articles being interesting. A story can dance up and down Reddits top page instead of being buried out of existence by a few power users. I think you would be hard pressed to visit Reddit and not find at least one article where you learned something new or didnt flat out laugh!