Every day, Redditors create millions of stories across thousands of extraordinary communities—from the brilliant minds at Showerthoughts and DataIsBeautiful to gifsound... just to name a few.
With over 202 million monthly users, Reddit is now officially as big as Brazil—and there’s just no other creative community like it out there. The front page of Reddit often dictates Internet trends—and news sites—as a result. Countless articles are written about content you create and curate—sometimes with proper attribution (but usually not).
We think it's amazing that the world hears your stories. You inspire millions through your humor, sense of community, and quirk, so, we'd like you to meet Upvoted, a new Redditorial publication. Upvoted is Reddit's home to all the original content we've been working on this year.
Our podcast has already amassed over 1.6 million downloads in 2015. The newsletter has hundreds of thousands of subscribers that wake up each Sunday to enjoy a curated digest in their inbox. Last month, we started posting original content directly to r/upvoted, including an interview with the guy handing out his resume at Busch Stadium. The subreddit amassed its highest traffic with over 700,000 unique visitors. With Upvoted, editorial, original video, podcasts, and graphic art have a place to thrive and tell Reddit’s tales in the most creative ways possible.
One of you actually predicted this not too long ago. Good call, wise sage.
The site will feature anywhere between 10-40 stories a day, written by a team of writers and editors. They will scour every nook and cranny to cover Reddit's untold stories, conduct interviews, and, in some cases, orchestrate podcasts or video content.
To commemorate the launch, we’re releasing three episodes from our first season of video AMAs. You can view AMAs from Neil deGrasse Tyson (on r/Art), Hillary Duff (on r/IAmA), and Nate Silver (on r/DataIsBeautiful) here!
We want to go beyond the upvote and tell stories with you and your communities at the epicenter. What happened before that post was made? What happened afterward? We’re not here to repackage content and present it as our own. We’re not just regurgitating stories. The focus here is you: Reddit’s collective sense of creativity is the spotlight.
Here are a few of my favorites, thus far:
- How Three Survivors of Suicide Spent Their Last Days On Earth
- What Happens When a Black Hole is Formed in Your Pocket?
- 7 Ways Comic Books Made Baseball Better
- SooperDavid's Real Life Doodles Have a (Surprisingly) Uplifting Backstory
- Meet Sandy Barbarella: The Woman Who Reads to Dogs
We’ve also structured our team with this focus in mind. The Upvoted team is a separate team within Reddit. It has a team of writers, editors, a product manager, and a designer. This is not taking valuable development resources from things like search, mod tools, or figuring out what happened to The Button. Each submission to the Upvoted site will post to r/upvoted, but will be treated like any other subreddit on the site and will receive no preferential treatment. Upvoted doesn’t work if it’s exploitative. Keeping our focus on community is our goal.
The site will not feature any banner advertising at present. We will be working with brands on sponsored content, all of which will be visibly distinguished as such. If it's not providing value, we don't want it. To make sure this is the case, the Upvoted team will pitch story ideas to brands and then own the entire editorial process of those articles. We’ve created limited space for sponsored content on the site. We prefer quality to quantity. Here's an example of what sponsored content might look like:
We really hope to make Upvoted a collaborative place focused on telling stories in the most unique, creative ways possible. Head over to the site or its subreddit and let us know your thoughts on how we can make that happen. OR, if you see something cool happening on Reddit, feel free to let the Upvoted editorial team know!
I’ll be sticking around in the comments for a bit to answer any questions you have.
