GigaOM » Reddit

Three things that Reddit did right during the Boston bombings and why that matters

Mathew Ingram — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 20:46:55 +0000

Although mainstream media outlets like CNN and the New York Post have come under plenty of fire for the way they handled information during the Boston bombings (Reuters even fired one of its social-media editors), much of the attention has focused on what Reddit got wrong — in part because it seems to puncture many of the hopes and dreams about the value of “crowdsourced journalism.” Reddit’s general manager has even apologized for the community’s behavior. But before we throw Reddit completely under the bus, I think it’s worth looking at what the network got right and why that matters.

Some of the commentary about Reddit and the bombings has made it seem as though all of Reddit was engaged in a massive “witch hunt” to find the identity of the suspects in Boston. But the reality is that other parts of Reddit were doing things that were much more valuable, and I think we shouldn’t lose sight of that. So here are a few things that I think Reddit got right:

It collected verified information: There were multiple Reddit threads that did nothing but curate or aggregate information about the bombings, including links to police reports, news articles and other sources. These threads also helped collect photos and video clips of the Boston marathon that might have contained useful information — and asked anyone with that information to also send those photos and clips to the authorities.
It helped people who wanted to help: A number of the threads early on in the aftermath contained lists of all the things that users could do if they wanted to assist not just the investigation but the people who had been injured — from links to Google’s Person Finder and the Red Cross help line to information on where to pick up bags left at the scene, or airlines who had changed their policies on cancelling flights as a result of the attacks.
It helped to verify facts: In most of the information-gathering threads, there is real-time verification of the info occurring, as users challenge other users to prove their claims. It is almost identical to the discussion that occurs on a Wikipedia “talk” page, in which editors try to verify the information that is being posted to an entry. Multiple updates occur within minutes of each other, and each one is marked with the time and any edits that took place.

Is Reddit capable of journalism? Yes

Even Reddit itself posted a disclaimer on one of its threads that said it isn’t trying to be a media entity, and that what it does isn’t journalism. And the user who created the “Find Boston Bombers” sub-Reddit or thread told The Atlantic that he doesn’t think of it as journalism either, and that no one should ever rely on such threads as a source because there is so much conflicting information flying around. He also admitted that the attempt to identify the bombers from photos was “a disaster.”

So if even Reddit itself doesn’t claim to be producing journalism, why do I keep saying it is? Because I think Reddit and Twitter and other social tools are broadening the concept of journalism. Some, like my friend Raju Narisetti from News Corp., believe that we should call this kind of thing something else — like that horrible term “user-generated content” — and leave the term journalism for things that are produced by professionals who are held to standards (although some might question whether the New York Post fits that description).

@mathewi you should fear. Find a new definition for non-journalism and use it. Why call ugc, crowds as journalism. It isnt.—
Raju Narisetti (@rajunarisetti) April 22, 2013

In a nutshell, I believe that journalism is being atomized — that is, broken down into its component parts. One of those is the news-gathering function, whether it’s from eyewitnesses or just on-the-ground observation. This part of journalism can and is being done by anyone, thanks to what Om has called the “democratization of distribution,” and it can be hugely valuable. And the verification function has also been outsourced, so that people like Eliot Higgins can play a key role in identifying Syria weapons without leaving their apartment.

Reddit may have failed badly in one specific thread, and that is unfortunate. But other parts of the site have and continue to perform valuable functions that I see as part of the broader landscape or ecosystem of networked journalism. Instead of focusing just on the downside of that community, we should be thinking about how to take advantage of it — how to turn a negative feedback loop into a positive one.

Post and thumbnail photo courtesy of Shutterstock / wellphoto K

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Reddit + Boston: Journalism gets better when more people are doing it

Mathew Ingram — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 15:21:54 +0000

We’ve already talked about how Twitter has changed the way that real-time journalism functions during news events like the Boston bombings, by taking all the editorial activity that usually happens behind the scenes in newsrooms — the speculation, the fact-checking, and so on — and pushing it out into the open where anyone can take part in it. But it’s not just Twitter, of course: as we’ve seen this week, other social platforms like Reddit are also playing a growing role. Is that good or bad? As with most things on the internet, there’s plenty of both.

Within hours of the explosions in Boston, members of the Reddit community had created a thread (or sub-Reddit) about the incident, in an attempt to identify potential suspects. Users posted photos that had been published online or submitted by onlookers and analyzed video clips, piecing together clues like a specific kind of zipper that was used on a backpack found at the scene. Eventually, two potential suspects were identified — including one who posted a message on Facebook about his innocence.

Plenty of mistakes to go around

After some more investigation and crowdsourced information gathering, users on the Reddit thread seemed more or less convinced that the two were not likely to be the actual bombers, and eventually declared them “cleared.” Meanwhile, the New York Post identified the same two people as potential suspects and published their photos on the front page (both suspects have now been identified — one was reportedly shot by police on Friday and as of mid-afternoon on Friday the other was said to be on the run).

Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic wrote that the process taking place on Reddit amounted to “vigilantism,” and was reprehensible, and warned against encouraging untrained people to try and determine the validity of forensic evidence after such an event. But is what happened on Reddit so bad? And is it any worse than what the traditional media have done in similar situations? I’m not convinced.

Yes, users of Reddit made mistakes — plenty of them, including identifying the wrong person as a suspect a second time on Thursday after erroneous information emerged from police scanners and other sources, something which caused a considerable amount of grief for a young man’s family and led to an apology posted on Reddit by a moderator.

But it should be noted that CNN and the NY Post have made plenty of mistakes as well, something Ryan Chittum of the Columbia Journalism Review doesn’t really mention in his post about how brilliant the traditional media was and how wrong Reddit has been. The larger point is that this isn’t an either/or situation — crowdsourcing is valuable, and has been valuable for journalism and will continue to be. This is admittedly not an example of it at its finest.

Remember when we didn’t think random people putting together an encyclopedia would ever work? And yet it has — in part because it has a lot more structure than Reddit or 4chan. And those sites would probably be a lot more useful in these cases if people spent more time thinking and less time typing. But that doesn’t negate the value they can provide. The idea of using the knowledge and resources of the crowd is the whole point behind Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger’s “open journalism,” and it is a force we need to figure out how to tame, not dismiss as irrelevant based on one incident.

Open journalism works better

Am I calling what Reddit has been doing since the Boston bombings journalism? Yes. It may not encompass the entirety of what we know as journalism, and it is clearly flawed, but it is certainly an important aspect of it — just as Eliot Higgins, an unemployed British accountant, is performing a valuable journalistic act (one that New York Times writer C.J. Chivers has recognized) in verifying smuggled weapons in Syria by watching hundreds of hours of YouTube videos every day, even though no one is paying him to do so.

Will Oremus at Slate makes a fairly persuasive argument that Reddit has in some cases been *more* responsible in its attempts to identify the individuals than some traditional sources, including the Post. This kind of crowdsourced fact-checking and verification of evidence has been going on for years — it’s just more mainstream now. And anyone looking for evidence of someone jumping the gun and encouraging vigilantism doesn’t have to look any further than CNN.

When I wrote recently about the benefits of having journalism occur out in the open, journalism teacher Steve Fox and others said I didn’t spend enough time on the need for verification, and maybe I didn’t, but I believe this also should be done out in the open. In fact, one of the benefits to doing so is the ability to have more eyes on the information at hand — thereby making it easier to filter out the noise and find the signal, or triangulate the truth. As Jay Rosen has said, journalism gets better the more people there are doing it. And that includes Reddit.

Post and thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr users Christian Scholz and Eva Blue and Jan-Arief Purwanto

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

How the public is reshaping media at Reddit, Vox and LinkedIn

Jeff John Roberts — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 14:09:39 +0000

Digital technology is transforming not just how media is made, but who is making it. At elite digital brands, readers and the general public are having an unprecedented role in shaping media and content creation.

At a paidContent Live session hosted by Slate chairman Jacob Weisberg, three media companies described a new breed of creators who are equally at ease with content and technology. This has led to the emergence of non-traditional media influencers such as comment communities at Reddit, and at Vox Media sites The Verge and SB Nation.

“In the day, if you wanted to create media, you had to start as an intern making coffee,” said Vox CEO Jim Bankoff, adding that now anyone with $100 can make a movie. He explained that this democratization of content creation has resulted, in some cases, of Vox hiring people on the basis of their comment contributions.

This has led to a culture of empowerment in which everyday people are as fluent in media as many traditional journalists. More and more, they are taking to public platforms to not just report, but to take part in the news.

Erik Martin, GM of Reddit, cited “random acts of pizza” — a community on the site that sends pizza as a gesture of support, most recently to emergency workers in Boston.

But does this new culture of public participation also has a dark side? Slate’s Weisberg pointed to Reddit’s current efforts to identify the Boston bomber, including posting a suspect’s photo on the site, as approaching vigilante justice.

“Reddit may be creating the next Richard Jewell,” said Weisberg, referring to a police officer who foiled an Atlanta Olympics bombing plot only to be falsely accused as a suspect in a traumatizing “trial by media.”

Martin said he regarded the role of Reddit employees as “groundskeepers” who helped discrete communities determine their own standards.

Dan Roth, a former Fortune editor who now oversees news on LinkedIn Today, offered a further example of how non-journalists are creating media. He described how executives like Virgin Airlines CEO Richard Branson are now writing regular columns in their own voices. While such contributions in traditional media typically amounted to no more than press releases, Roth said that readers’ ire at inauthenticity has forced even corporate executives to reevaluate how they write.

Check out the rest of our paidContent Live 2013 coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

A transcription of the video follows on the next page

Go to page 2 (of 2) on GigaOM .

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Former Kleiner Perkins partner Ellen Pao to join Reddit and lead strategic partnerships

Eliza Kern — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 19:47:41 +0000

Former Kleiner Perkins partner Ellen Pao, who sued the firm for sexual harassment last year and departed the group in October, has announced that she will join Reddit and lead strategic partnerships for the company.

Reddit wrote in a blog post that Pao has already been both a formal and informal advisor to the company for over a year, and has now decided to join full-time. In a statement in the post, Pao explained why she will be joining the social news community:

“I grew up in Maplewood, New Jersey, raised by enginerds on Star Wars, computers and books. I live in San Francisco, via New York City, Boston and Hong Kong. I’ve worked with dozens of tech companies, traveling to eleven countries on five continents, to help build a variety of consumer and business platform companies. My favorite subreddits are /r/IAmA and /r/pareidolia (I like people even when they’re not real). Being part of a community of people who care is inspiring and energizing. reddit has so much to offer so many people, and I’m excited to find partners to help make reddit even more awesome.”

Pao left Kleiner Perkins in October after filing a complaint against the firm for gender discrimination. As the Wall Street Journal reported in March, the case is not yet closed, and Kleiner Perkins has hired a prominent lawyer to defend the firm.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Content monetization: News licensing and syndication still need marketplaces and infrastructure

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 06:55:25 +0000

Publishers’ lack of strategic focus on licensing and syndication today is matched by nearly equal indifference from software developers, entrepreneurs, and investors. Millions of investment dollars and countless development hours have gone into creating online advertising tools, readership analytics, and aggregation engines. But comparatively little has gone into developing the sort of tools, APIs, metrics, or exchanges that might have aided the emergence of a content licensing and paid syndication business online.

Key highlights in this report include:

For publishers, the first step to monetizing something is to be able to measure it. The analytics tools now available make it possible to track the spread of content on social platforms closely.

Until now there has not been a marketplace where those potential buyers and sellers of content could meet. Nor were there adequate tools to enable verifiable transactions between them. Tools like Cascade and Ricochet are helping put the foundations of such a market in place.

Both publishers and licensees will need to seize the sort of ad hoc syndication opportunities that arise online and on social media networks. One of the major tasks facing publishers over the next three to five years will be to structure their repositories of content so they can be searched, sorted, customized, repackaged, and accessed in real time via standardized APIs.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

What a pig, a goat and an eagle can tell us about the decline of traditional media

Mathew Ingram — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 16:11:54 +0000

If the rise of social media — and specifically the explosion of “viral” content on networks like Facebook and Twitter — has done nothing else, it has certainly given mainstream media plenty of “user-generated content” to add to their dwindling repertoire of journalism. Almost every newscast seems to include a video of cute animals or some other clip that is making the rounds on the social web. Unfortunately, no one seems to care much whether any of these videos are real or not, and that is a very real problem.

The New York Times has written about one recent example of user-generated content gone bad: namely, a video clip of a baby pig “rescuing” a hapless baby goat who is trapped in the pond at a petting zoo. Within hours of the clip being posted to YouTube last fall and subsequently shared on Reddit, it had appeared on The Today Show, NBC’s Nightly News, Good Morning America and dozens of other channels — and why not? It was incredibly cute, and had a feel-good message of the kind that morning shows in particular enjoy.

Of course, the video turned out to be a clip from a new TV show, which the creators manufactured and then uploaded as a kind of viral-marketing ploy. Not only did the baby pig not “rescue” the baby goat, but the producers of the show had to spend hours building an underwater track to even get the pig anywhere near the animal — and in the end they had to use a trained pig, after the one they were originally planning to use showed no intention of going into the pond.

Does it matter whether these clips are real?

As the NYT piece notes, when NBC Nightly News host Brian Williams introduced the video clip, he said he “felt duty bound to share this” with the audience, and added that he didn’t know whether it was real or not. Is that enough of a disclaimer to absolve a media outlet of responsibility for figuring out whether something can be verified or not? Many would argue that it is not. Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute compared it to “a form of malpractice” for journalists (McBride has more on that in a blog post about the incident at Poynter).

@mathewi No. Even though it may seem trivial because it's a pig video, it's embarrassing and adds to distrust of the media.
—
Liz Heron (@lheron) February 27, 2013

Obviously, part of what shows like Good Morning America do is pure entertainment — in other words, not journalism by any stretch. But clips like the baby goat rescue show up on programs like The Nightly News as well, and the hosts rarely say anything about whether a clip is real or not. In some cases, these videos come right after a news report about something serious. How are audiences to know when something is “just entertainment” and therefore hasn’t been checked?

In another recent incident, a video purporting to show a golden eagle snatching a small child from a park went “viral” on the social web and showed up on a number of media outlets. It too turned out to be fake — the creation of some hard-working students in a computer-generated imagery course at a school in Montreal. The students deliberately chose something that seemed almost believable, based on “urban legends” of such incidents in the past.

We need to be careful what we amplify

Interestingly enough, the clip was debunked within hours of being uploaded, by another young programmer with some expertise in computer-generated imaging (as well as by other outlets such as Gawker, which pointed out obvious signs others could have noticed). But as with many corrections in a digital age, it took longer for the truth to propagate than it did the original video — and many of the outlets that shared the original didn’t bother to update their audience with the facts.

Om wrote recently about how one of the key responsibilities of journalists in this new age of “democratized distribution” of information is to pay attention to what they choose to amplify and what they don’t, and incidents like the baby goat video bring that home with a vengeance.

If all a media outlet is doing is sharing the latest video from Reddit or a tweet from a celebrity, how is that adding anything meaningful to what viewers can get elsewhere? It isn’t. And if traditional media continue to imitate their online competitors like BuzzFeed or Reddit without adding anything of value, then they will likely find that audiences are happy to go to the original source of that content rather than relying on the TV news to find it for them.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Donskarpo

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Bill Gates on the future of computing

Om Malik — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 22:02:56 +0000

Photo: OnInnovation

Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, took to Reddit and chatted about scores of issues. I found this one bit particularly interesting. While he might not preside over Microsoft like he once did, Gates is an astute observer of technology trends.

Robots, pervasive screens, speech interaction will all change the way we look at “computers”. Once seeing, hearing, and reading (including handwriting) work very well you will interact in new ways.

Of his other comments, I found this one pretty telling and it resonated with me:

If the microprocessor had NOT come along I am not sure what I would have done. Maybe medicine or theoretical math but it is hard to say.

And here is what he had to say about Steve Jobs:

He and I respected each other. Our biggest joint project
was the Mac where Microsoft had more people on the project than Apple did as we wrote a lot of applications. I saw Steve regularly over the years including spending an afternoon with him a few months before he tragically passed away.

Does he still code and if so in which language?

Not as much as I would like to. I write some C, C# and some Basic. I am surprised new languages have not made more progress in simplifying programming. It would be great if most high school kids were exposed to programming…

On a more macro topic, what needs changing in the world that money cannot help?

It would be nice if all governments were as rational as the Nordic governments – reaching compromise and providing services broadly. The Economist had a nice special section on this last week. Africa governments have often been weak but you can’t write a check to change that. Fortunately the average quality is going up. Mo Ibrahim tracks this in a great way. (http://www.moibrahimfoundation.org/IIAG/)

Which world-wide health cause could be solved with just a bit more in terms of attention and resources?

Polio is the first thing to get done since we are close. Within 6 years we will have the last case. After that we will go after malaria and measles. Malaria kills over 500,000 kids every year mostly in Africa and did not get enough attention until the last decade. We also need vaccines to prevent HIV and TB which are making progress…

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

HuffPo’s new ‘Conversations’ will improve comments — and make money for AOL

Jeff John Roberts — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 13:30:39 +0000

I’m not a regular reader of the Huffington Post but when I go there, I’m astounded how many people leave comments on a given story. Last week, for instance, more than 20,000 readers offered their two cents on HuffPo’s account of Hillary Clinton and Benghazi — and this was just in the first two hours. Such numbers are impressive but it’s never been clear how a reader can navigate this teeming mob of voices nor how all this chatter helps the HuffPo make money.

Now, though, the Huffington Post’s comment strategy suddenly makes a lot more sense in light of “Conversations,” a new tool that surfaces discrete discussions within the comment stream and then lets readers read those discussions on a separate webpage. In the case of the Hillary story, for instance, the first comments that appear at the bottom of the story will now be “conversations” sparked by popular members of the existing HuffPo community.

The new set-up should make it easier to jump in on a given debate about the story that’s of interest. In the Benghazi story, for example, groups of people can find each other to discuss specific facets of the story — whether the US should be in Libya; whether the incident was Hillary’s fault; whether Hillary is actually a Muslim agent sent from Mars to destroy America and so on.

The fact that the “Conversations” will now have their own URL also makes it easier for people to share them and invite others into the discussion. The feature in some ways resembles the buzzy start-up Branch which lets people grab existing conversations and continue them in new places (though, unlike Branch, HuffPo’s system is not invite-only). To get a better idea of what HuffPo is doing, here are two screenshots from a recent story. The first is an existing conversation (I’ve circled the button that takes it elsewhere) and the other is what the conversation looks like on the new URL:

Huffington Post CTO, John Pavley, explained in a phone interview that the site relies mostly on algorithms to parse comments and to identify worthy conversation leaders but that it uses human moderators too. HuffPo’s inspiration for its comment system comes in part from Reddit, the popular group-reading site, he added. (The move also comes that at a time that publishers led by Gawker’s Nick Denton are re-evaluating the philosophy of comments in general).

The share-a-conversation feature serves to make order out of the comment chaos, but could also turn into a serious money maker for the Huffington Post. According to Pavley, the company will use parent company AOL’s ad platform to serve up relevant ads next to the conversations. This is significant because the HuffPo will not only have more pages to monetize; it will also be able to offer advertisers the promise of “hyper-engaged readers.” This type of audience is being touted by companies like Disqus as extra valuable because readers are more likely to engage an ad if it’s next to a subject they’re passionate about — the idea is that, if they’re taking the time to comment, they presumably are engaged.

HuffPo is rolling out Conversations slowly and, for now, the feature is only appearing on the site’s World and Gay Voices sections. It will appear across the whole site soon.

(Image by siSSen via Shutterstock)

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Why BuzzFeed’s photo spat with Reddit could be just the tip of the iceberg

Mathew Ingram — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 19:39:01 +0000

BuzzFeed’s impressive growth — capped off by a recent $19-million venture-financing round — is a testament to the site’s ability to find and package “viral” content on a range of topics, from heartwarming photos of charitable acts to a collection of cookie jars shaped like dogs. But a blowup with the online community Reddit over the ownership of some of the pictures that BuzzFeed used in a recent post has reignited a debate over the way the site uses such images. It’s an issue that is likely to become even more urgent as BuzzFeed continues to grow.

In the latest incident, the site put together a collection of images that were created using the long-exposure function on some cameras. But it wasn’t just a regular post — the collection was created for Samsung as part of BuzzFeed’s “native advertising” or sponsored content program, where the site creates a post and tries to get it shared by users in the same viral way that its regular posts are (the post, entitled “14 Amazing Photos That Were Totally Not Photoshopped,” appears to have been removed but there’s a Google cache version here).

Creating sponsored content with borrowed images

BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti has made it clear that he sees this kind of native advertising content as the future of digital-media monetization (something he will be talking about as part of our paidContent Live conference on April 17 in New York City). But if the site continues to run into allegations of copyright infringement based on the pictures or other content it uses in these sponsored posts, that could make it somewhat harder to sell clients on the idea — and with its recent venture funding, the pressure on the company to toe the line is only likely to increase.

Web sites should start with the notion that if they cannot find a photographer's contact info for a picture, it is unavailable for use.
—
Glenn Fleishman (@GlennF) January 11, 2013

The problem for BuzzFeed, and for plenty of other online-media players, is that the line they need to toe when it comes to copyright infringement is so blurry. Particularly when it comes to photos, the difference between blatant infringement and “fair use” is not easy to define — although many armchair legal scholars (including many of BuzzFeed’s critics) would like to pretend that it is. When it takes a court more than three years to determine whether Google’s use of thumbnails in an image search qualifies as fair use, it’s safe to say the issue is complicated.

To some, it seems obvious that taking someone’s photo from another source and using it without permission is infringement. But what if that photo is a slightly modified version of a photo that has appeared elsewhere? Who owns the rights? In some cases, the pictures BuzzFeed uses can be easily traced to their creators — as Wired pointed out in a previous incident involving a professional photographer, who later settled with the site over the use of her photo. In other cases, it’s not obvious. (BuzzFeed has also been sued for using celebrity photos without permission, as my colleague Jeff Roberts has pointed out).

BuzzFeed says it is trying to improve

Peretti told me in an email the same thing he said to Mashable: that is, he regrets any offence caused by using some of the photos that came from Reddit in the campaign, and agrees the site should try to track down the original posters (one of the criticisms that is often levelled at BuzzFeed is that it provides links to the photo itself on a third-party hosting provider like Imgur rather than to the original source). In his email message, he said:

“We were very concerned that we upset people in the photography subreddit. We immediately addressed the complaint… and posted an update in the reddit thread. The BuzzFeed post was designed to show how cool that sort of photography is so we regret making these awesome, creative people upset. We’d be happy to talk to any of them directly to figure out how to work together with photographers active on imgur.”

So how hard should BuzzFeed have to try in order to find the original creator? And if it can’t find them, should it be allowed to use the photo or not? It’s easy to see the site as the bad guy, taking people’s photos without asking and trying to make money from them — but the reality is that “remix culture” or whatever we choose to call it has become commonplace online, for better or worse. Photos and videos are edited, remixed, combined and uploaded thousands of times until the original owner of the various parts may be almost impossible to determine. Why is using such a photo not fair use?

The biggest issue is that “fair use” itself is such a thorny concept. Everyone thinks they know it when they see it, but definitions are all over the map. In part, that’s because it is a horrendously complex legal principle that is based on four often conflicting factors (purpose of the original work, amount of the original that is used, the purpose of the infringing work and the effect on the market for the original). But as complex as it is, it’s also a crucial part of the foundation of the social web, whether we choose to admit that or not.

These are not easy questions to answer, by any means — but they are becoming increasingly important for sites like BuzzFeed (and even Reddit itself) to grapple with head-on, especially since so much of their financial future depends on making sense of whose content they are using and how.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock/mtkang and Shutterstock/Lightpoet

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Reddit raising venture financing? It would be crazy not to

Mathew Ingram — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 14:21:02 +0000

The online community Reddit is said to be raising a round of venture financing that could value it at $400 million or more, according to a report at TechCrunch. Whether there is any truth to the rumor remains to be seen, but the idea that Reddit could be raising that kind of equity is hardly far-fetched. Not only does it have the kind of traffic and engagement levels that many media sites would jump at, with more than 37 billion pageviews in 2012, but building up its financial resources would allow the site to go head-to-head with some of the other players in the social-content space, including Tumblr and BuzzFeed. The only thing Reddit has to be wary of is ruining the community that made it successful in the first place.

If Reddit does manage to raise enough venture funding to give itself a half-billion-dollar valuation, it would mark an incredible reversal of fortune for the company. Not that long ago, Digg was the superstar online community, the one that drove massive amounts of traffic to any link that was shared on the network — the one whose cofounder appeared on the cover of Businessweek magazine behind the title “How this kid made $60 million in 18 months.” Reddit, by contrast, was a much smaller phenomenon, and was quietly acquired by the Condé Nast magazine empire in 2006. (Reddit was spun off as a separate entity in 2011, but Condé Nast retains control).

As Digg went through a number of redesigns that ultimately drove away many of its hardcore users, Reddit continued to grow steadily, thanks in large part to a hands-off approach by its parent — something Steve Newhouse (chairman of Advance Publications, which owns Condé Nast) described in a recent interview with the New York Times. Reddit also became known for its community-driven innovations, including the “Ask Me Anything” feature. (Reddit general manager Erik Martin will be part of a panel on new-media entities, along with Jonah Peretti from BuzzFeed and Chris Mohney from Tumblr, at our paidContent Live conference in New York on April 17).

Can Reddit grow without suffering Digg’s fate?

By the time Digg came apart last year and was sold off in pieces to the Washington Post and Betaworks (which has since re-engineered the service), Reddit was by far the dominant player. And the community — which added a CEO last year with the hiring of Yishan Wong, a former Facebook engineer — has continued to hit new heights over the past few months: it engineered an “Ask Me Anything” interview with Barack Obama, and traffic has continued to grow at a phenomenal rate. But the site is clearly looking for ways to improve its revenue as well — Wong announced a membership drive last year that was designed in part to avoid the need for more intrusive advertising.

As a number of observers have noted, much of the content that appears on BuzzFeed — and drives massive amounts of traffic to the site’s viral posts — originates at Reddit. That fact can’t have escaped the company’s attention (BuzzFeed is valued at about $200 million, based on its most recent financing round). So why not try to build on that by expanding the reach of the network and taking advantage of the user-generated content it produces, instead of letting others like BuzzFeed get all the benefit? Raising venture funding would give Reddit some funds to accomplish that, and give Condé Nast a payoff for the money it has invested in Reddit since the acquisition.

For Reddit, one of the big challenges of this approach is that trying to turn the community into more of a mainstream media entity risks damaging the somewhat anarchic personality that gives the network most of its unique character. In some cases, that personality veers into outright offensiveness — as it has with some of the “sub-Reddits” run by notorious Reddit troll Violentacrez. Wong has said that Reddit is committed to free speech even when it is offensive to some, but maintaining that commitment is going to be harder once VCs get their hooks into the company.

Digg suffered from a number of fatal flaws. One of them was embarking on a series of redesigns that appeared to be driven by financial motives rather than user demand. If Reddit can achieve a half-billion-dollar valuation and continue growing as a media entity without falling into that particular black hole, then its transformation into a social-media superstar will be complete.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock/Africa Studio and Flickr user jphilipg

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.