What Reddit DOESN'T Do

A few days ago Reddit wrote a blog post to celebrate the fact that in December 2011, they had over 2 billion monthly page views and over 34 million unique visitors on their site (and 10% of that is Canadian!). The blog post also points out that in the past year, traffic to their site has doubled and users are spending an average of 16 minutes/visit on the site.

As my friend Fred Moesker pointed out, it's interesting how they achieved this based on the list of things they DON'T do:

  • We don't get traffic through ads.
  • We don’t participate in any traffic trading.
  • We don’t email our users (unless they choose to enter an email and then forget their password).
  • We don’t harass users to sign up.
  • We don’t harass users to invite their friends.
  • We don’t pester you to download our app.
  • We don’t use slideshows and other pageview gimmicks.
  • We don't know anything about SEO.
  • We don't integrate with Facebook.
  • We don't even link to our Facebook or twitter accounts.
In a time when sites are becoming increasingly connected and our online profiles are telling a deeper story of who we, its interesting to see Reddit take almost an opposite approach: focusing on the community of people together, rather than on individual identification.
-Parker