I believe that Reddit is one of the best communities I have seen on the Internet. I also believe that Reddit would benefit from more resources and less corporate interference. We can offer all of the above. And we’d love to buy Reddit and all those pesky troublesome users that we love so much.
You may've heard this news about Ben Huh offering to buy reddit from Conde Nast. I've been getting a lot of questions about my thoughts on the matter.
Frankly, this isn't the first offer to buy reddit I've heard, but it's the first public one. In fact, the way I learned about the blog entry describing the team's difficult financial situation was from an SMS offering me the chance to buy reddit back.
Team reddit needs help, but I wouldn't expect anyone to call you, Ben. In fact, I'd be very surprised if reddit were sold.
That said, a site that gets almost 300,000,000 impressions a month should be monetizable in a way that doesn't ruin the user experience. Steve and I didn't even run ads on reddit until at least 6 months in and even then only ran a single skyscraper on the comments pages (as long as it conformed to our guidelines of not expanding, autoplaying, or otherwise being annoying).
To this day, those guidelines stand. The skyscraper has become a single 300x250 ad unit (now on every page) and we added self-serve sponsored headlines as a great, non-invasive way to do advertising right. I can't think of many(any?) similar sites with such little irritating ad space.
It's something our community really appreciates, but setting this precedent means reddit can't get away with things other sites wouldn't mind doing to their users. Maybe that's why the community is one of the best online, I don't know, but it does pose a difficult monetization problem that hasn't yet been solved.
Considering all that you've done with the Cheezburger empire, Ben, I think it's at least worth dropping a note to Chris Slowe & the team to chat over some... uh... cheeseburgers?
If you made it this far still expecting LOLcats, I'm sorry. I lied.
Updated with LOL-TL;DR, so I'm not a liar.
