Cond© Nast-owned news aggregator Reddit announced today that the site had more than 1 billion pageviews in January.
But Reddit&'s growth didn&'t just come from the site&'s typical role as a news aggregator. Reddit&'s sub-communities, which focus on a specific topic or theme, have become increasingly popular as well.
It seems Reddit isn&'t necessarily just about bringing news to its community members any more. That function is still a very large part of the site, as posts about the protests in Egypt and Canada&'s looming metered Internet billing littered the front page over the weekend. But the Reddit crew has seen a lot of success outside the website as well a4‚¬a4¯ they‚ launched a successful &''Secret Santa&'' campaign that included 17,000 Reddit users from 90 countries exchanging gifts. Most cities have their own active Reddit communities as well.
Reddit also recently hosted an &''awards ceremony&'' of sorts for its top sub-communities and users. Winners included a community that posts‚ poorly-drawn comics about daily rage-inducing events to‚ ridiculously complex military escapades involving a dog in a fort made from couch pillows. The &''novelty account of the year&'' award was given to a user who replies and comments with quickly drawn images.
Those are pretty good numbers for a site that was seen second to news aggregator Digg for a long time. That was until Digg decided to remake the site and kill a number of features, leading to a mass exodus. Quantcast, a traffic research company, indicates that Digg now has 8.2 million unique visitors, down from nearly 16 million unique visitors in August before the latest version of Digg was released. Reddit boasts nearly 14 million unique visitors, according to the numbers it released today.
Reddit certainly isn&'t shy when it comes to disclosing its traffic data. The site did a &''state of the union&'' style post on its blog in January that disclosed its monthly traffic a4‚¬a4¯ around 829 million monthly pageviews, from 250 million pageviews a year earlier.
Reddit has about 10 employees working from San Francisco, New York, Salt Lake City and Los Angeles. It was founded by Alexis Ohanian, who sold the service to Cond© Nast and went on to work with travel site Hipmunk (a favorite of VentureBeat&'s Anthony Ha).
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Companies: Conde Nast, digg, Reddit
People: Alexis Ohanian
Companies: Conde Nast, digg, Reddit
People: Alexis Ohanian
Matthew Lynley is VentureBeat's enterprise writer. He graduated from the University of North Carolina, where he studied math and physics, in May 2010. He has reported for Reuters. He currently lives in San Francisco, California. You can reach him at mattl@venturebeat.com (all story pitches should also be sent to tips@venturebeat.com), and on Twitter at @logicalmoron.
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