We told you via our new reporters’ log this morning as soon as we found out Conde Nast had bought Reddit. Now we’ve had a chance to talk to Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian to get a few more details. He’s not spilling the price, but he tells us that Reddit broke 1 million unique visitors last month, and has 100K members (for comparison, Digg reports 20 million unique monthly visitors, though that number has been disputed). As Ohanian writes on the Reddit blog, the company felt it had to take VC funding or be acquired to deal with growth, and Conde Nast offered “about as much autonomy as an acquired company could get.”
Reddit and Conde Nast have been working together for a while; they collaborated on Reddit’s first white-label service, Lipstick.com. Since then, Reddit has struck deals with WPNI (operator of washingtonpost.com, newsweek.com, and Slate) as well as Gawker.
Reddit has raised under $100,000 from Y Combinator and an undisclosed angel investor over the last year and a half. It has just 3.5 employees (one is about to complete his PhD) who will be moving out to San Francisco.
We had previously polled readers in July to ask who Wired would buy next, and Reddit received 16 percent of about 300 votes cast, following Boing Boing and Gawker.
Liz,
Have you heard of fark.com? I am relatively new to GigaOM and therefore not aware if you’d already covered it before. Reddit/Digg, etc. seem to be a lot like Fark (or perhaps the other way round), although the latter lacks any rating or “learning” system. It would be interesting to know how Fark compares to the Reddit/Digg, in terms of popularity.
Anil
Alexis “he” or “she”?
Hi Anil,
Fark takes user submissions too, but it is an edited site. They do have the option of paying $5/month to get all the submitted stories. I don’t know the number of unique visitors but a Business 2.0 story said they had 40 million page views per month. Alexa seems to think they are about the level of Reddit.
See:
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2006/09/01/8384325/
http://www.alexaholic.com/fark.com+reddit.com+digg.com
Hi Roupen, Alexis is a guy.
I don’t know for sure, but Google reader says that this story appeared in GigaOm India section. May be a problem with feedburner or google reader. Let me know if you want me to mail you the screenshot.
Why the differences in unique visitors from TC to Giga? The numbers aren’t reported in the exact same units… but the math didn’t match up.
Am I missing something… or can no one really nail down that type of data?
Graydon,
not sure what you mean by the difference. but essentially that is what they told us, so we are going on their word. basically the numbers in the whole web space, kinda confusing.