"""James Erwin, a Reddit moderator of several subreddits including r/history, argues that Reddit’s unwillingness over the years to provide strong, hands-on leadership to the site’s community is at the heart of the company’s lackluster business performance. Without a firm editorial grip, the flourishing of disreputable subreddits opened the door for BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post, and others, which sift through Reddit content and repackage it to advertisers in more sanitized conditions. “Reddit is watching other people eat its lunch,” Erwin says."""
I think this loses the magical thing Reddit has - extremely strong intent signals from millions of people who are constantly voting on these items.
An interesting route to monetisation for Reddit would be divorcing the hive mind from the more passive viewers. There are probably a sizeable number of people who really don't care about the discussions / community interactivity element within Reddit and don't even possess accounts. What if Reddit created an independent app which used the live data from all of these sub-reddit upvotes, comments, (sentiment analysis?) and the rate at which something got picked up to do their "buzzfeed"-esque curation? Reddit's repackaging would create that neutral advertising-safe space, which could be successfully monetised in different ways.
An example of this would be say a deep-connect with content providers like Netflix and Hulu as well as whatever sub-reddits exist for movies, where they have a curated, passive viewing experience of say short-movies culled from a combination of Youtube, Vimeo, and Netflix to create a unique mix that wouldn't exist anywhere else. This would create a constantly changing, dynamic "TV-like" experience. Some viewers would like to engage around what they've watched and then Reddit could close the loop and get more data. I'm sure there are other interesting things to do with all of the photos they have in their dataset. As well all the articles and user-submitted content. (a better Flipboard type app?)
Reddit the company doesn't have to fight with reddit the chaotic force. They can just harness and use it to achieve a scale of manual curation no one has ever attempted before. It could become something quite special.
All the weirdness from Reddit seems to come from historically mixing the CEO role with the Community Manager role. There should be an entire department only dealing with on-site issues and that department should have absolute authority. Reddit grew from a 2 person company where everybody did everything, but did it actually grow up once it got bigger? Reddit has had a valley golden child touch since the beginning, so normal company growth patterns haven't always happened where would you expect in the lifecycle of a company because "lol reddit—we're differunt!"
Having the CEO be at the mercy of users in a multi-million-user fractured community is like having Tim Cook be the top level escalation for Apple tech support. Sure, the users may love it, but it's not sustainable for a company. Give the users an outlet for their rage and moderation problems, but don't touch the toxic waste personally.
What I'm trying to say is that they don't even have to touch that entire "community" thing. It's a massive headache and it's better to leave it alone than try to whip it into something monetisable. They can treat it as a loss-leader, extract the data it generates, and spin-off revenue generating assets from it.
Yes, that is one of the dozen new (almost too obvious) things it seems would be a slam dunk for them.
If people are stealing your content, reformatting it, and just placing ads around it, you sure as heck can do that yourself. Sprinkle some magic app dust around it and -bam- drive buzzfeed out of business, which I think is what we all truly want (except for some clueless VCs who value buzzfeed at billions of dollars [vomit]).
I think this loses the magical thing Reddit has - extremely strong intent signals from millions of people who are constantly voting on these items.
An interesting route to monetisation for Reddit would be divorcing the hive mind from the more passive viewers. There are probably a sizeable number of people who really don't care about the discussions / community interactivity element within Reddit and don't even possess accounts. What if Reddit created an independent app which used the live data from all of these sub-reddit upvotes, comments, (sentiment analysis?) and the rate at which something got picked up to do their "buzzfeed"-esque curation? Reddit's repackaging would create that neutral advertising-safe space, which could be successfully monetised in different ways.
An example of this would be say a deep-connect with content providers like Netflix and Hulu as well as whatever sub-reddits exist for movies, where they have a curated, passive viewing experience of say short-movies culled from a combination of Youtube, Vimeo, and Netflix to create a unique mix that wouldn't exist anywhere else. This would create a constantly changing, dynamic "TV-like" experience. Some viewers would like to engage around what they've watched and then Reddit could close the loop and get more data. I'm sure there are other interesting things to do with all of the photos they have in their dataset. As well all the articles and user-submitted content. (a better Flipboard type app?)
Reddit the company doesn't have to fight with reddit the chaotic force. They can just harness and use it to achieve a scale of manual curation no one has ever attempted before. It could become something quite special.