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.

The feature could give stories a better chance of getting more exposure when they otherwise wouldn’t necessarily made it to the front page. Digg’s Kurt Wilms explains:

Digg Trends identifies and highlights upcoming stories that have a high volume of activity (think Diggs, comments, favorites, shares, etc.). When we detect a new trending story, it will appear on the homepage for ten minutes. Based on the Digg and bury activity in those ten minutes the story will either become popular or not. To make it easy to follow the action, we’ve setup a Twitter account to tweet out when a new Digg Trend is up for voting on the homepage.

Digg says the goal of Digg Trends is to put high activity stories in front of the community quickly and present a fun way for people to express whether they like a story or not. "We only show the most basic information for each story so as to ensure that voting is as unbiased as possible," says Wilms.

Digg has often been criticized for being too clique-ish, meaning it has been hard to get on the home page without having the right friends, although Digg has taken steps to make the site better for more people in the past. This should help that as well.

Related Articles:

> Digg Elaborates on New Search

> Digg to Get All Twitter This Year?

> Digg Does it Again with Advertising

"Marketers need a mechanism for spotting consumer trends as soon as they begin to emerge, especially as the U.S. economy starts down the uncertain road to recovery," says Cynthia Stephens, director of Marketing for Compete.  "The Compete 250 gives marketers a window into online consumer activity and sentiment, which helps them keep a pulse on the market and capitalize on the Internet economy."

Here’s a look at the top 50 sites from the 250, followed by the top 20 site traffic gains from June to July:

Sits like Toyota.com, GM.com, and Fordvehicles.com grew by over 20% thanks to the "cash for clunkers" initiative. Blockbusters like Bruno, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and Transformers 2 led to big boosts in sites like Flixster, Moviefone, and Fandango, while IMDB and Netflix held strong as usual.

Back to school season most likely contributed to an upswing at sites like Walmart.com and Target.com, and the News aggregator and Social Generated news category has just been growing steadily since June 2008.