If you thought Reddit was a huge website before, well ... you most likely had no idea how big the news aggregator site really is now. In a new post this week, Reddit CEO Yishan Wong wrote, "Over the last couple years, reddit traffic and usage have continued to grow by leaps and bounds — in October 2012 alone we were up to over 3.8B pageviews and more than 46 million unique visitors."
Yes, that is 3.8 billion, with a big "B", page views. Venture Beat reports that number is double the pages Reddit was generating just a year ago. It might have helped that a certain President Barack Obama decided to launch a surprise "Ask Me Anything" Q&A with Reddit readers during that month as part of his reelection campaign.
So you would think that Reddit would be rolling in the money, right? Well, they are ... but the website, part of the Condé Nast publishing group, wants to bring in more revenue besides just Internet ads. Wong stated this week that Reddit will expand and extensively promote its already existing Reddit Gold service, which gives users a way to turn off the display ads on the site, among other features. The Reddit Gold service costs $29.99 a year, or $3.99 a month.
Wong feels that Reddit Gold will help the site be more independent, stating, "Advertising will probably always be a part of our revenue, but we want to be ultimately beholden to you, the users."
Via: Venture Beat
Source: Reddit blog | Image via Reddit