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Comment by stevenj | Hacker News Reader

The article forgot about Reddit. Not sure what the terms were though.

I believe reddit was sold for ~$10MM. It was acquired when it was ~18 months old, long before it was as large as it is today.

Reddit was pretty low, I think. It was an undisclosed sum, but Reddit was not the internet juggernaut it is today.

reddit was one of the most undervalued sales of all time.

Was it? They're not exactly rolling in profits seven years after launch.

because they are very concerned about annoying/destroying the community.

in the hands of a purely profit-oriented company they would make enormous amounts of money and milk the site until its demise a couple of years in

Dubious. Reddit's users are viciously anti-commercial. I doubt you could make that much money from traditional advertising there...

the core surely is anti-commercial but the main subreddits like r/funny or r/pics and the like are so huge that the majority consists of "normal" internet-consumers that visit other sites as well and are used to commercials, the reddit-frontpage is mainstream, it's no longer an obscure site that some nerds know about

and in addition they could have very targeted advertising for the highly specialised subreddits.

but aggressive money-making surely would destroy the community and turn the site into a superficial link-collection with comments in the style of youtube but you could milk it for a couple of years and earn a lot

the reddit hivemind HATES being monetized with a fierce passion, unless they feel they're actually getting something invaluable in return they will complain about even the tamest of ads

It has billions of pageviews per month. I think that makes you more than $10 million.

It's a top 50 website. With the right management (which it doesn't have), it could be THE community site on the web.

What's the pageview to dollar exchange rate again? That's bubble talk, honestly.

I realize you are being sarcastic, but in all seriousness it depends on the site.

Newspapers sold ads based on circulation for over a hundred years. TV shows sell on ratings. Why would valuing websites on the same basis be a bubble?

Newspapers and TV shows have well-established advertising systems, unlike websites. And Reddit hardly even monetizes itself.

Reddit is huge. I'm as skeptical of bubble metrics as the next guy, but if their owners sold reddit today they would reap a huge profit.

That's a "bigger fool" investment, as in, if you're foolish enough to invest in a business with no feasible way of profiting enough to justify the investment, it doesn't matter because an even bigger fool would profitably buy the business. Which is exactly what bubbles are made out of.

Reddit couldn't monetize its way out of a wet paper bag full of money.

It's like every effort to try and introduce revenue is taken timidly, like some nervous kid trying to ask out a girl on a first date only to shy away before saying anything. Seriously? You have billions of page views. Figure it out.

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