According to an official blog posting on Reddit, the site has broken the 1 billion page views barrier, a feat limited to only an exclusive club of around 100 websites. The exact number (as shown above) amounts to a healthy 1,000,404,480 page views according to Google Analytics stats for January 2011 that tracks the website.
The site which only employs about 10 full-time staff, had this to say:
Never has a single punctuation mark brought us so much joy. There are only about 100 sites on the entire Internet that get a billion pageviews in a single month, and now reddit can put on its smoking jacket and join that exclusive club. The New York Times isn"t on the membership list, nor is Expedia, Weather.com, about.com, or Fox News. In your face, meteorologists!
Despite having just 13.75m unique visitors, the site was able to rack up the page views thanks to individual users" propensity to linger for a very healthy 15m and 40 sec, browsing an average of 14.7 pages as they do so.
The most impressive stat is the extraordinary growth from last year: 250m page views in January 2010, compared to to 829m page views in December.
Much of the growth probably happened at the expense of Digg, which has witnessed an exodus of its users since it launched Digg version 4. Since then Digg was later forced to lay off 37% of its staff, amounting to 25 employees.
Image credit: Reddit Blog