edit (removed wrong maths): $1.9m per month in staffing costs @ 230 employees/100K each. Although a reply below says the staff may have almost doubled and $100K may be a low guestimate for the area (inc. benefits, etc).
My question would be: Why does Reddit have 230+ staff? What do most of them do?
They're not making 100K / month. So how is 10M / month not slightly crazy? I realize we're not talking anything but staff here, but 8M / month in sales/marketing/office space/infrastructure? Maybe my notion of what it costs to run a site as large as reddit is just way off.
To fair, five wasn't enough. We spent too much time firefighting and not enough time innovating.
I honestly don't mean this in a back-handed manner, but what innovations have come about since that time? Reddit is great because of its momentum and user generated content. That model does best when the admins stay out of the way for the most part. Many (including myself) are not at all a fan of the more recently emerging dark patterns or the site redesign. I don't see those as innovations.
And externally the biggest one was mobile support, which is light years ahead of what it was back then.
Beyond that you have community managers, people to run AMAs, people to manage ad accounts, HR, etc... 230 people to run the one of the largest and most dynamic sites on the Internet doesn't seem out of line.
Data: - Ranking timelines - Ad performance - Recommendations - Business analytics - R&D
Product: - Coordinating across the above 2 and adding/measuring (new) features
Sales: - Ads
Finance/HR/Admin/Accounting/Office Manager(s)/Recruiting: - Running a company
Sure you could argue you don't need 100 engineers for that, but if you factor in on-call rotations and how they're constantly refactoring everything...
I worked at an avionics manufacturer that had a dozen or so products (things like physical displays and map systems that go into airplanes) that had less than 10 full time engineers. A few software devs, a few EE’s and an industrial engineer who did the chassis. Sure it’s not an apples to apples comparison but wow. Does it really take that many people to maintain an already-working web site? Isn’t the promise of “cloud” that your staff can scale far slower than your user base?
Craigslist has what, 50 people? Better comparison. Even that seems to be a lot.
Probably. Unless you want to get shut down/sued for all the child pornography, narcotics trading, violent threats, doxing, etc, etc which people will use your site for. Not to mention all the other attempts to directly exploit, hack or manipulate your site. And larger scale tends to attract more bad actors.
I'm sure Reddit justifies it to themselves somehow.