You return again and again, contributing and voting and building the site into something that millions want to be a part of. It gives us eye-popping traffic numbers. And the percentage of you who block our ads is astoundingly small for such a tech-savvy audience. Put together, these factors allow us to ink the big advertising deals which keep this site afloat.
But not all ad revenue comes from big-ticket clients. Through our sponsored link system, you've been promoting your startups and small businesses... even redditors with nothing to sell have been using it to give their blogs and opinions and YouTube videos a boost in traffic and views. These deals are a lot smaller (they start at $20 / day), but there are so many of them that they add up to be another major pillar of our support.
Finally, more and more of you continue to sign up for reddit gold, or give it to each other as gifts. This is very important because it proves that a site like ours can cover the costs of its own growth without being forced to resort to ever-more-annoying ads. Every time someone subscribes to reddit gold, this point gets stronger.
What's that, you say? It sounds like, "Great, you're making money. Whoop-de-do. When are you going to fix the site?"
Welcome, Jason!
Well, this should help: We have a new member of the reddit technical staff. His name is Jason Harvey — a.k.a. alienth — and his arrival doubles the size of our systems administration team to the unprecedented headcount of "two." In his first week, Jason's already upgraded our monitoring system and built too many RAIDs to count. Going forward, he'll begin addressing a number of infrastructure issues that have been put off for far too long. The impact on you will be a faster and more stable reddit experience. If you have an idea for what title we should give him, let us know in the comments. We were thinking "server monkey" but HR didn't have a code for it.
If you don't recognize that thing on his shirt or that thing in his hand, just check the comments on this blog post. Clearly you've wasted your life studying things other than science fiction cartoons and vexillology.
But wait, there's more!
We're also growing in ways that are more behind-the-scenes. For example, our sales department will also be doubling in size, thanks to Jena Donlin, who will be transferring from another, more boring area of Conde Nast to work full time on securing big contracts for reddit. We promise to keep things unobtrusive in exchange for your continued lack of adblocking, and the money Jena brings in will help pay for the next round of servers and engineers. If you have any advertising ideas or happen to work in the media industry yourself, drop her a line and we'll have her people (i.e., her) talk to your people (i.e., you).
On top of that, two longtime users and overall reddit celebrities are joining the fun. They'll be keeping their day jobs but pitching in for reddit on the side: krispykrackers is going to help us keep up with our endless feedback and customer support queues, and qgyh2 will help manage our Amazon Associates links.
And this expansion isn't over; we still need more programmers, and we're going to address this problem immediately. Stay tuned.
In conclusion...
...we'd like to welcome these new additions to our team and we tip our hat to everyone who made it possible, be it in the form of submissions, community moderation, t-shirt ownership, adblock-not-doing, sponsored-link-buying, or reddit-gold-subscribing.
TL;DR: Four new hires plus more to come. You make reddit grow, and we love you for it.
