Thursday, November 08, 2012

Now is the Time... to Invest in Gold

Over the last couple years, reddit traffic and usage have continued to grow by leaps and bounds in October 2012 alone we were up to over 3.8B pageviews and more than 46 million unique visitors. Our server costs also continue to grow, so we have a choice to make: we can start running a bunch more ads, or we can give you, the community, more reasons to support the site with your own money through reddit gold. Advertising will probably always be a part of our revenue, but we want to be ultimately beholden to you, the users.

reddit gold was started a couple years ago to great initial success. While many people have continued to purchase gold, gift reddit gold to each other, or send in postcards, we’ve never really promoted the program, so a lot of active redditors don’t even know about it. Today we want to announce a recommitment to reddit gold, a program we’d like to expand and promote.

So what are we doing to make reddit gold better? First, for those who’ve never heard of reddit gold, here are some existing benefits:

  • Highlight unread comments since the last time you visited a thread
  • See up to 100 subreddits on your frontpage
  • View your karma per subreddit
  • Turn off the display of ads
  • Access to a special members-only lounge that may or may not exist
  • ... and more!
We’re also launching some new things:
  • An oft-requested feature: comment saving and filtering saves by subreddit
  • Ability to give gold to other peoples' comments you really like (we call it “gilding”)
  • Some upgrades and fun stuff in the members-only lounge that may or may not exist
  • We might add a remote-controlled office robot you can drive. Under construction.
We don’t always intend to make these features gold-only — in cases where it would be beneficial for everyone to have them, we’ll eventually migrate the features to the whole community. But for reddit gold members, you get first peek.

We also want to make reddit gold a membership that confers real benefits that are worth what you pay for it, so we’re talking to some reddit-friendly companies to provide special perks or access to stuff for gold members. Stay tuned for more.

And, we’re looking to hire a generalist engineer to help build out these features faster. If you think you’re the one, take a look at the job description and join us to help make reddit better, more golden.  


Finally, we would like to thank all our current reddit gold members. You're the ones who first made reddit gold possible and allowed us to run a site backed by its community rather than catering primarily to advertisers. We hope you enjoy the new stuff!

"The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom and benefit."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson