Reddit can be monetised today, right now, without a single intrusive advert.

The key is affiliate programs.

Go talk to Skimlinks, point out your traffic, laugh at their rates and then stop to think for a moment. If reddit signed up to every affiliate program there was and didn't share revenue with skimlinks or anyone... if reddit took care of explaining what they were doing and how they were doing it... the readership would be fine.

Hell, you want me just to use the site as normal and inadvertently through doing so I end up clicking links that lead me to buy stuff occasionally and this gives you some pennies. Sure thing, doesn't bother me.

Pennies, yeah, that's all it is. Except that's a penny or two per click. Reddit has size and traffic. Reddit could link to the odd item here or there behind affiliate paywalls and those unobtrusive and naturally organic links created by virtue of creating such a large community could monetise the whole thing.

Don't believe me? Try it for one month. And then when your jaw hits the flaw remember to give me some credit for it. Affiliate schemes keep most forums alive and allow them to exist with minimal advertising. There, I've let my secret out. I run small forums, and they are making me a lovely nest-egg... if I had the cash I'd buy reddit just to put affiliate links on it... it would be an immediate cash cow, and the readership would be fine as they'd understand why, and visually no garbage would have changed the experience.

The key is to do all affiliates, leave no penny on any table. Every click that could earn you money, should.

Technically all you need is a set of rules to process any existing link in any post or comment, and to detect whether that URL goes to a destination that has an affiliate program. If it does, strip any existing codes and drop in yours, if it doesn't then leave it alone.

Oh,and tell people explicitly not to game it. No-one need ever create fake clicks or fake atricles. The organic mass is enough.

Well there's an idea for historious! Seriously, though, while users might rebel against this in many communities (rewriting their links to make you money sounds bad), I think reddit could easily pull this off, as it's not immoral or in any way reprehensible.

Besides, the community has been very understanding and accommodating time and time again. I don't know about reddit, but this idea sounds like a goldmine for my own sites. Thanks!

It couldn't work for historious. Your ability to store a cache of a whole page is based on the same safe harbour that Google use to provide their cache. Namely that you merely act as a cache and the page is unmodified in any way. Modify the page, and you no longer have that safe harbour, now you'd have taken content from elsewhere and re-purposed it to have affiliate click-throughs... you'd have no defence to copyright infringement claims.

Historious has to store and present the cached page unmodified.

Oh, no, not the cache. There's much more opportunity in the links themselves. You historify an amazon item to go back to it later, and when you click the link to go there, our affiliate tag is inserted. Besides, you don't look at the cache when shopping, you look at the links.

I already pushed an initial version of this yesterday, it leaves your cache alone, is unobtrusive and gives us some extra money as you normally use the service.

If it goes well, we can even think about removing the limit for free users!

That works, in fact that use is going to be fine.

For your size, you probably would benefit from just applying skimlinks as they would give you a slice of revenue that you're not tapping into.

Once you go beyond a certain amount of traffic, ditch skimlinks and do it yourself. They take too much revenue.

If it's that easy, why isn't everyone doing it?

Most people are so busy running the community, taking part, adding features and generally caring for it that they don't really see this.

If you look at financially successful forums you tend to only see what is visible, the adverts. But actually most successful forums make way more revenue from affiliate schemes than they do from the adverts. Affiliate schemes are almost invisible to the end user, unless you're looking for them in the links on the site you won't even notice them.

Just look at this company: http://www.internetbrands.com/

All it owns and runs are forums.

It may not be sexy or cool, but there is a lot of money in it and reddit is a great site and really shouldn't have a problem.

Do you mean to say that the forums rewrite the URLs the users paste in such a way, or that the links on the forum itself (vs. the links in posts) are affiliate marketing?

Yes, exactly that.

Not at all of them do it, but for the motoring section a large number rewrite the eBay ones because the value of a click-through on a high ticket item like a car is enormous (relative to the affiliate fee for a book or CD).

There's only two ways to pull it off: 1) You audience is kinda dumb and doesn't know (wouldn't work on reddit), or 2) You just come clean and say you're going to do it as it is one of the most viable ways in which to make the site fund itself and to produce a profit (which would work on reddit because it's not intrusive and wouldn't change what people are doing already).

In the latter case you need to make sure no-one games it. There is enough click fraud detection to make this the next problem... once you've tapped into a gushing well of money you really need to make sure that the actions of your own community don't turn it off. Which effectively means trying to make sure that no-one is gaming your system (with best intentions to help you) with fake click-throughs.

But even there, a work-around is to provide your own proxy to the click traffic and to run something to detect abnormal traffic... if it looks to be outside of a set of parameters, strip out the affiliate info and redirect as normal. This minimises the risk of losing the revenue stream once it's been acquired.

The more I hear about this, the more I think that reddit could pull it off. If they came clean, I really doubt there would be any discontent at all. The only problem might be that most of the links are imgur links nowadays, but they could make lots of money even from the occasional amazon review link.

If they stuck to pay-per-action affiliate links, like Amazon's, for example, they wouldn't even need to police it for gaming (I don't think Amazon would mind people buying things to help reddit out).

"If you made it this far still expecting LOLcats, I'm sorry. I lied."

Sad.

You're right. I feel bad now. Adding LOL-TL;DR.

Someone forgot to sign up for reddit gold account (spez too). /r/lounge without reddit founders just doesn't seem right.

True enough, but it's from a co-founder of the company so it's potentially worth reading.

of course reddit is monetizable...all it takes is flooding it with ads

768x90 adsense unit just below the submission title alone would probably make reddit instantly profitable.

and that doesn't take into account the premium google adsense ads.(imagine if a random #1-#5 url title from the top was an adsense ad?)...one that had the exact font style as regular reddit ads. Those just browsing, wouldn't even notice the little gray "powered by Google" text.

then add CPM based ads...maybe something that would play on mouseover...those tend to bring in the big bucks.

or just sell advertising directly for some brand awareness campaigns. Honda, Walmart, McDonalds.

And boom...you got a profitable "community".

So there is no reason for Conde Nast to sell reddit(especially at a loss)...if they were interested in generating more revenue, they could do it at a flip of a coin.

Sure it would piss off a lot of users...but it's not like people would abandon a site, just because there are a few more ads present.

These suggestions, while normal on any other site, wouldn't work on reddit.

The real problem reddit has is that it's community, which can be amazing at times, has grown used to a great user experience when it comes to advertising - the lack of it that is. Just ignore the box on the right and the occasional sponsored link in the top box. Should a flash-based ad appear in the right-hand box there'll be a front-paged topic on it in an hour. reddit has treated it's users well, but they baulk at the slightest change in that - and herein lies the real problem to monetising reddit. reddit has to monetise while keeping it's community happy. Since community happiness and advertising seem to be pretty much polar opposites it seems to be impossible.

What I'd do is increase advertising aggressively for non-logged in users, reduce it greatly for registered users and keep the option to remove it completely for gold members. Hopefully those that really hate advertising would sign up for gold, however there is probably a correlation between those that make the most noise about advertising and those that wouldn't do that as they don't believe in paying for things on the internet - completely unfounded but a gut feeling.

> Sure it would piss off a lot of users...but it's not like people would abandon a site, just because there are a few more ads present.

Being a technical audience AdBlock (already is but) would be widely used rendering it useless. I know reddit was monitoring adblock usage at some point - I'd like to know the results of that.

Vaksel has it right though. And of course it would work on reddit. Just slap a link underneath it that says 'click here if you don't want to see these ads'. That goes to the payment page. And offers you a 'you're a cheapskate' option that disables the ads without payment.

Positioning reddit as poor and hard to monetize is a fantastic strategy if you want to buy it back some day.

Why is it necessary to keep the users happy? So some will leave, but others will join. They are big enough that if they loose some, they'll be OK.

And actually I don't think they'll leave anyway.

They'll use adblock? So? What do they have to loose? You are worried that users will block ads, and the solution is not to run any?

It's a user driven site. At millions of people it's obviously not entirely personality driven, but still the site is driven by the actual individual people who submit and comment. They generate not just the content but the tone of the site, which is what keeps people coming back. You can't treat them like a straight up commodity that can be swapped in and out.

So I guess no one has learned anything from the previous discussions on HN.

Reddit has hit critical mass and therefore has a substantial user base - start charging a monthly fee. Even at $1 a month, I'm sure they could be pulling in 6 figures every month.

Or perhaps I'm mistaken and all they need is more ads.

Cheezburger sites are definitely tilted towards the annoying side of the ad balance. Which is probably fine for the their audience but would be tragic for reddit.

There is a middle ground there.

In the case of ads, "middle groud" is often a few steps down the slipperiest of slopes.