On the Reddit blog, Erik Martin writes, “This change is all about setting up reddit so that it can better handle future growth and opportunities. When reddit was acquired in October 2006 by Condé Nast, it was receiving about 700k page views per day. Now, reddit routinely gets that much traffic in 15 minutes. This explosion in traffic created technical, cultural, and organizational growing pains. reddit now has the kind of resources it needs to continue improving and supporting the community’s experience far into the future.”

As we reported last week, Reddit has been experiencing some tremendous growth of late. Over the past 15 months, it has tripled in size, the company said in a blog post. Since last May, we’ve grown from 7 million monthly unique visitors to 21.5 million. Our pageviews have exploded 4x to a staggering 1.6 billion pages served per month,” it said. “This growth brings new diversity, new opportunities, and new challenges to our communities. There are now over 6,500 subreddits with over 100 subscribers.”

“reddit Inc. is now owned by Advance Publications (which also owns Condé Nast), so even though the organizational shift is important, reddit is not really going anywhere. reddit Inc. will report to a Board and therefore have much more operational freedom than when we were a division of Condé Nast,” Martin explains. “Details are still being finalized.

Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian is talking about the news in a Google+ post. He writes:

The investment of time and love changed my life the day Condé Nast acquired us, but I never could divest myself. Traffic continued to increase, but surged after I left to volunteer for Kiva in Armenia (correlation or causation, I’ll leave to you) and the site — now one of the top 50 in the US — needs the independence its fellow online titans enjoy.

reddit has become the engine for creating innovative and influential communities online. I’ll do everything I can to help and guide the reddit, Inc. team and our CEO to grow true to the vision we’ve had since that summer of 2005. As always, there’s no reddit without community. Thank you for bringing us this far, I’ll look forward to serving you as we discover what the future holds.

The company has actually started searching for a new CEO.

Yesterday, Reddit posted the following message:

The reddit admins were just blindsided with the news that, apparently, we’re not allowed to take advertising money from sites that support California’s Prop 19 (like this one, for example).

Reddit says the decision was made at the highest levels of Condé Nast, and that "Reddit itself strongly disagrees with it, and frankly thinks it’s ridiculous that we’re turning away advertising money."

Enter Huh’s offer. On the site The Daily What, which is part of the Cheezburger Network, there is an email Huh wrote to Condé Nast, which says:

I have made this offer privately to a few people associated with Reddit, and I’ll say it publicly now:

Condé, we’ll be waiting for a call.

Huh is a big fan of community. Here’s an interview WebProNews did with him not too long ago:

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Reddit says its trying to convince "Corporate" that they’re making the wrong decision. Maybe Huh can convince them to make another decision entirely. Reddit doesn’t appear to be too happy under Condé. They recently began asking for user donations for support, because they were not getting enough resources from the company.

By the way, Reddit decided to run Prop 19 ads anyway.

After accounting for potential cannibalization of some print subscriptions, the industry could realize $1.3 billion in incremental revenue, the consortium says.

The study dealt with about 230 periodical titles and surveyed 1,800 consumers in the U.S. It looked at "likely formats and features of emerging interactive periodicals" and did not take into account advertising, commerce or single copy sales. In other words, we’re talking subscriptions only.

"The landscape for digitally distributing magazines and newspapers is about to rapidly change," said Martin Kon, partner and head of the global media and entertainment practice at Oliver Wyman, which conducted the study for Next Issue. "Our Future Marketplace Simulation shows significant consumer enthusiasm for interactive periodicals that offer enhanced features, personalization, multimedia content and optimized layout and navigation."

Next Issue lists the following as "key findings that underpin the revenue projections" in the study:

1. Among device-owning subscribers, the availability of interactive editions at the point of renewal, at the same price as today’s print editions, drives a 9 point increase in the overall subscription renewal rate, from today’s 55% industry average to 64%.

3. The interactive format enables effective cross-selling via recommendation engines and browsing features; 17% of current subscribers make additional purchases.
 
4. Automatic renewals eliminate the traditional "bill-me later" model and greatly reduce churn, from an average of 45% today to 25%.
 
5. The introduction of interactive editions in an online store setting, at the same price as today’s print editions, triples uptake rates among device-owning non-subscribers, from 5% to 15%.

The findings can be perused in a white paper available here (pdf).

Original Article: Reddit has announced Reddit Gold – a paid version of its service. It costs what you are willing to pay for it. As Reddit describes, "It’s a way of supporting reddit, boosting our bottom line and helping us afford faster computers and more employees (or was it the other way around?)."

In other words, Reddit needs help, and is asking for donations.

While the idea of paying for an upgraded version of Reddit may not sit well with all Reddit users, one would expect the company’s approach of set-your-own-price to be more appealing than Reddit simply setting one itself. Gawker uses words like "begging" and "sad" in describing Reddit’s announcement, but at least it’s honest.

Reddit is owned by publishing empire Condé Nast, which owns such publications as GQ, Wired, Glamour, Vogue, and Ars Technica (to name a few), but that doesn’t mean said empire is willing to fork out too much cash to support the Reddit team’s needs.

Reddit’s Mike Schiraldi writes, "Whenever this topic comes up on the site, someone always posts a comment about how reddit is owned by Conde Nast, a billion-dollar corporation like Time Warner or Cobra, and how if they wanted to they could hire a thousand engineers and purchase a million dollars worth of heavy iron. But here’s the thing: corporations aren’t run like charities. They keep separate budgets for each business line, and usually allocate resources proportionate to revenue. And reddit’s revenue isn’t great."

Again, at least it’s honest.

In May, Reddit got nearly a million unique visitors, according to Compete data.

These companies released a joint announcement today saying that they have entered into an independent venture to develop open standards for a new digital storefront and related technology that will "allow consumers to enjoy their favorite media content on portable digital devices."

The idea is that publishers can boost online revenue in a similar fashion to what the companies behind Hulu are doing with online television The publishers say the goal is to create a highly featured common reading application capable of rendering the distinctive look and feel of each publication, a publishing platform optimized for multiple devices, operating systems and screen sizes, a consumer storefront with an extensive selection of publications, and a rich array of advertising opportunities.

The selection of publications will not be limited to just those from the companies involved. They are saying that the venture will welcome other publishers to offer their content as well. Publishers will get their revenue from content and advertising sales, as well as print subscriptions.

"For the consumer, this digital initiative will provide access to an extraordinary selection of engaging content products, all customized for easy download on the device of their choice, including smartphones, e-readers and laptops," explained John Squires, the venture’s interim managing director. "Once purchased, this content will be ‘unlocked’ for consumers to enjoy anywhere, anytime, on any platform."

The storefront will of course offer magazine and newspaper publications, but will also include books, comic books, blogs, and other media. The venture does not yet have a name. It will be interesting to see what they come up with and if consumers jump on board with the model.

Is this a step in the right direction for publishers? Tell us what you think.

Related Articles:

> Google Changes How it Handles Paid Content

> Minds of the Media Gather to Discuss Future of News

> Google Okay With Blocking News Corp.

> Is it Really Crazy to Block Google?

A fresh online version of Details is almost certainly sitting on the backburner.  Otherwise, David Kaplan writes, "A high level source at the company tells me that aside from Details, Conde Nast had been planning on creating several independent sites for a number of its mags next year, including GQ and Conde Nast Traveler."

Such a big turnabout sounds a bit scary, especially in light of Conde Nast’s decision earlier this week to close Flip.com, a social scrapbooking site.  In keeping with the kitchen metaphor, one has to wonder what else – Wired?  The New Yorker? – is getting nudged towards the chopping block.

Flip.com appears to have been a bona fide failure, however, with Compete putting its number of unique visitors down 87.6 percent year-over-year.  Details.com, CNTraveller.com, and GQ.com are all experiencing impressive levels of growth, so the idea of them getting left alone isn’t so bad.

Anyway, as Matt Van Hoven asked about a new Details.com, "What would that look like . . . about 10 million pages, each of which contains be-hipstered, chachily-mustachiod men?  Can’t wait!"

Google Syndicating Video Through AdSense

The Times reported that Google was working with those companies to syndicate their videos on other websites. The videos are sponsored and Google splits the ad revenue with both the website that runs the video, and the producers of it.

We’ll use Adversus.com as an example because it’s a lot more fun than the StreetInsider.com running Pantene sponsored Wall Street Journal videos – aren’t those publications rivals though? If you look to the bottom of this Adversus model page (see, I said it was a lot more fun), you’ll see a video box "powered by Google."

In that box, is a short tutorial, one of 22 tutorials it appears, from Epicurious.com about how to use knives. Above the box is a text link to Epicurious.com. In this example, it seems Epicurious.com is both the advertiser as well as the content producer. It’s not clear though, what knives have to do with advertising models – but who really cares?

What matters is that this is next step to TV-ifying, for lack of a better word, the Internet. The NYT article alludes that this is a real compromise from video content producers, who traditionally have absorbed all ad revenue generated by their content. Though the producers would rather have all that audience to themselves, they realize that traffic to there site largely depends on Google.

Kim Malone, director of online sales for Google AdSense, said the new program offered producers and advertisers "literally millions of channels on the Internet." Economy of scale, then, where millions of funnels collect pennies from heaven, is enough to change the tradition of video advertising.

For anyone doubting Google moves in the past year, like buying YouTube, the new model serves as an expansion of an already blisteringly successful model.

"So what if Google/YouTube can’t come to agreement on distributing media companies’ content onto YouTube," writes Rafat Ali, "the other way around (the core of its business) is working just fine, thank you."

One of the earliest sightings of the change comes from the Google Operating System blog, where the author has a few questions about the new ad model:

* What are the videos sites? How to detect all of them and find the embeddable code?

* Will those sites want the Plus Box? Maybe they’ll say Google steals traffic from them, because they want to show ads and to have big page views.

* Who will click on the search result to see the video (and maybe some comments and context), like they used to do?

* It will be the first time when content outside of Google control will be included in the search results (for example, the thumbnails from image search results are hosted by Google). Will there be performance issues?

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Lycos bought the online brand, Conde the off, and they were a family by name. My sister was a reporter for Wired News and I watched from a distance as Lycos drove it into the ground. It’s more than common sense they come together again. And I hope Chris Anderson gets to hire back all that great talent (no, my sis isn’t available).

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Ross Mayfield is CEO and co-founder of Socialtext, an emerging provider of Enterprise Social Software that dramatically increases group productivity and develops a group memory.

He also writes Ross Mayfield’s Weblog which focuses on markets, technology and musings.