This weeks case study on the startup review is on the two year old social news site reddit. With almost 170k unique users and 1.9M page views per moth, it is one of YCombinators most successful company. (Scribd is one the latest ones which is quite hot these days). The company was eventually acquired by Conde Nast Publications in October 2006 for sub $10M (author’s guess, amount was undisclosed).
The key success factors start from easy accessibility and interesting key content, to initial community by Paul Graham (of Y Combinator) to successful partnership as an OEM.
A few interesting observation made in the post are that initially Paul Graham sent almost 3-4k visitors a day to the site. Another event that generated a lot of good publicity was the Lisp to Python controversy, when after 5-6 months after their launch the site was redesigned in Python. Finally, the successful exit to Conde Nast was due to the OEM relation of reddit with the company.
Another interesting thing, which might be relevant to a lot of community websites now would be
Reddit seeded the initial content on Reddit almost exclusively through the efforts of the Reddit team in the early days. For the first few months of Reddit’s life, Reddit co-founders Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman scoured the web to find interesting articles to post to Reddit. They were able to create the illusion of more contributors by submitting articles under different user names. As Reddit developed a loyal readership (due to the content hand-selected by the team) other users began to submit links, although the Reddit team was still responsible for 80% of the submitted links for many months. Reddit was able to spur contributions from the readership by creating a point system around a concept they called karma. By keeping a scoreboard of top contributors, this sparked a healthy competition amongst Reddit users to be a top contributor. Today, the community does provide all of the submissions rather the Reddit team.
On the whole, Reddit grew from 3k unique users a day to 170k unique users. Reddit did lose out on the whole to Digg because of lack of SEO support. Even today less than 10% of Reddit’s traffic comes from search engines.
Finally, Reddit managed to grow so large despite lack of SEO was due to its own personality, which came out with its content, providing links for the more intelligent crowd on the internet.
In the end, do go over to Startup Review and read every article if you are a budding entrepreneur or have just started out. The kind of analysis that site offers is just not found anywhere else on the big bad internet. (You might also try Ask The Wizard, by the founder of feedburner)
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May 11th, 2007 at 12:47 am
Very interesting muse Gyaan. IMHO you’re absolutely right.