Reddit Thrives Under Hands-Off Policy of Advance Publications

The following is an excerpt from an article in 

The New York Times
Monday, September 03, 2012

Reddit Thrives Under Hands-Off Policy of Advance Publications

By DAVID CARR

There are many ways to measure the traction of a social media platform: time spent, page views or unique users. But it might be useful to add one more metric: if the leader of the free world stops by to answer questions from your users, you’re probably doing O.K.

On Thursday, President Obama signed up for an “Ask Me Anything” (A.M.A. in geekspeak) session at Reddit, a vast social site that is a staple of digital life for the young and connected, but less well known among grown-ups.

The president answered a few benign questions — Michael Jordan is his favorite basketball player! — along with a few tough ones, including a request to explain his administration’s approach to Internet regulation. He even posted a picture to prove he was the one at the keyboard when he typed, “Hi, I’m Barack Obama, President of the United States. Ask me anything.”

While the Republicans were celebrating the potential and might of American business at their convention in Tampa, Mr. Obama was validating one example of business success on an entirely different platform. Reddit, which was founded by two fresh graduates of the University of Virginia in 2005, has just 20 employees, but serves up more than three billion page views a month.

With its basic graphics, endless links and discussions, Reddit can seem like peering into a bowl of spaghetti, but it has surpassed better-known aggregating sites like Digg to become a force on the Web. Occasionally, as in the instance of the Colorado shootings, it takes control of a news story early. Built on open-source software and guided by the ethos of its community, estimated by Quantcast to be 20 million users a month, it is a classic Web start-up in which opportunity seems mixed with barely controlled anarchy.

So who are the silky venture capitalists or young lions of Valley technology who own this vast unruly kingdom? That would be Advance Publications, the home of Condé Nast, the magazine company that bought Reddit back in 2006 for a reported $20 million. That kind of deal is usually a signal that a ritual sacrifice was about to begin in which a clueless old media company snaps up a hot Web property and proceeds to squeeze the life out of what it just bought.

But that is not what happened. Steve Newhouse, the chairman of Advance.net, decided very early on that his company would not be the blob that ate Reddit, and for the most part, left well enough alone.

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