What is Reddit? How does reddit make money?

In the growing trending news website and applications, how can someone forget about Reddit? Well, Reddit is one of the famous American social news aggregation, discussion website, and web content rating.

The registered members of the website submit content to the site sharing text posts, images, links which are then voted up or down by other registered members. The discussion with more up-votes appears towards the top, and if they receive enough votes, then it’s ultimately on the site’s front page.

It was the University of Virginia roommates Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman who founded Reddit back in 2005. Back in October 2014, Reddit was able to raise $50 million in a fund round let by Sam Altman including investors like Jared Leto, Peter Thiel, Snoop Dogg, Marc Andreessen, and Ron Conway.

 Caption: Reddit

Again, in July 2017, Reddit was able to raise $200 million for a $1.8 billion valuation, with the Advance Publications remaining the major stakeholder.

While checking the data of early 2018, Reddit had 234 unique visitors with 542 million monthly visitors. The site was ranked as #3 most visited website in the U.S. and was ranked #6 in the world. According to the Alexa Internet, 54.7% of views come from the United States followed by 7.5% from the United Kingdom, and 6.3% from Canada.

In 2015, Reddit had 6.89 billion up-votes from its user with 725.85 million comments and 73.15 million submissions.  It saw 82.54 billion page views. 

From a technology perspective, Reddit was written in Python for development flexibility in the language offers. Reddit runs an Amazon's cloud platform named Amazon Web Service.

 Caption: Reddit

Well, how does Reddit make money? This particular question might be striking on your head, right? Scroll down!

Just like other social networking sites, Reddit does make money through advertisements. There are many other sources in the revenue model of Reddit.

While making the advertisement appear on the front page, Reddit actually works as a sponsored link. The rate of the advertisements to be published generally started from $5 and $0.75 per thousand page-views. It can even go up to $20,000 based upon the number of page-views. So, it’s like higher the number of the page-views higher the amount.

 Caption: Reddit Advertisement

Similarly, Reddit also collects a decent amount of money by serving Google Adsense Advertisements on its sidebar.

Premium membership is also known as Reddit Gold has helped for a profile yielding. Reddit provides it’s user with some extra features like more comments per page, saving and categorizing the comments, and turning off the advertisements.

                                       Caption: Reddit Gold

Checking the data of the past years, Reddit gold earned $235,254.39 in 2013, $778,528.80 in 2014, 945,390.60 in 2015, and $961,996.98 in 2016. It was predicted that Reddit gold would make $1,038,507.58 but was able to make only $796,663.35 in 2017.