AllThingsD » Reddit

List of Sites Planning SOPA Protests Continues to Grow

Arik Hesseldahl — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 23:40:42 +0000

Even though President Obama says he doesn’t like the Stop Online Piracy Act as it is currently written and as such wouldn’t sign it, anti-SOPA protests are going to go on as planned tomorrow.

The plan is simple: Sites participating in the protest will go dark for the day or take some other action. Wikipedia, for example, will black out the English-language portions of its site for 24 hours. The move will likely shut out some 10 million users during the course of the day.

Politico pegs the estimated number of sites that will be affected in some way by the protest at 7,000.

Among the sites participating:

Google will post a link on its home page to a document explaining its opposition to the bill.
Mozilla.com, home of the popular Web browser Firefox, ~~will go dark~~ will do two things, see the update below.
Reddit, the social news site owned by Advance Publications, will go dark.
WordPress.org will go dark.
TwitPic, the popular site where Twitter users share photographs, will go dark.
MoveOn.org, the liberal-leaning political site, will go dark.
The Cheezburger network, including sites like The Daily What and Fail Blog, will be dark.
BoingBoing.net will be dark.
Several gaming companies, including Minecraft.net, Riot Games, Epic Games, 38 Studios and Red 5 Studios, will be dark.

Update: Mozilla just sent a statement outlining what it will do for the protest: It will redirect traffic from the main Mozilla.org and Mozilla.com English websites to an action page for 12 hours on Wednesday, January 18th from 8 AM to 8 PM Eastern Time. It will also make the default Firefox start page black so that the tens of millions of Firefox users will see a black page with a call to action message rather than the traditional white page with the Firefox logo.

Since the list is in flux, Irish bookmakers saw a chance to get into the act by accepting bets concerning which sites will go down for the day and which ones won’t.

Wikileaks was the favorite at 5-to-1 odds that it would join the protest. Myspace, the once mighty social network, was running a close second at 7 to 1, while Flickr, the Yahoo-owned photo sharing site, was at 8 to 1. Here’s a list of additional bets that Paddy Power was accepting:

14/1 YouTube
40/1 Amazon
50/1 Yahoo!
66/1 Facebook
66/1 TMZ
66/1 IMDb
80/1 LinkedIn
80/1 EMI
100/1 Twitter
100/1 eBay
100/1 AOL
100/1 iTunes
100/1 HBO
100/1 MSN
200/1 Sony
200/1 Universal Studios
200/1 Bing
200/1 Ask
250/1 BBC
250/1 Disney
500/1 Google
500/1 Fox

Go Daddy Withdraws SOPA Support After Online Backlash

Liz Gannes — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 21:19:13 +0000

Domain seller Go Daddy today backpedaled on its support for the controversial U.S. “Stop Online Piracy Act,” a.k.a. SOPA, which had drawn threats of boycotts on Reddit and elsewhere. Go Daddy, which had been an active participant in the legislative effort, also deleted previous blog posts about its support for the bill.

The Three Ventureers: Andreessen Horowitz Joining Conway and Milner in Y Combinator Start Fund

Kara Swisher — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 21:30:53 +0000

Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz said today that it was joining well-known investors Ron Conway and DST Global’s Yuri Milner in the Y Combinator Start Fund, which gives $150,000 to each start-up in its semi-annual group.

Andreessen Horowitz will be investing $50,000 of the total in each entrepreneurial effort, starting with the next “class” of up to five dozen companies later this month in the well-regarded incubator.

The money comes in the form of convertible debt, which is a loan that can convert if a start-up raises a funding round. Start-ups can refuse the money, although most do not.

“I can’t tell you how impressed we have been with the quality of the start-ups that Y Combinator has had,” said Marc Andreessen in an interview with me this afternoon. “[Co-founders Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston] have become the consigliere to a whole new generation of entrepreneurs.”

Indeed. Y Combinator assembles these start-ups twice a year, giving them about $15,000 to work on their idea, but — more importantly — providing a lot of support and entree to powerful investors in Silicon Valley. Its efforts have been critical to the beginnings of many successful companies, such as Reddit, Loopt and Scribd.

“So many of the high quality seed deals have been coming from Y Combinator and we wanted to be close to all those companies,” said Andreessen. “It’s a great view of what’s coming next from the very best start-ups.”

Conde Nast Spins Out Reddit, Without Letting Go

Peter Kafka — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 18:00:06 +0000

Five years after buying Reddit, Conde Nast is giving the social news site a gentle shove out the door.

The publisher isn’t pushing Reddit very far away, though. It is spinning out the company as a standalone operation, but will retain full ownership of it, for now.

Conde’s idea is that if Reddit operates on its own, it will be able to grow faster and attract a new breed of employee, including a new chief executive, a position it recently began trying to fill.

The publisher has also recruited Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian to sit on the “new Reddit”’s board of directors, along with Conde president Bob Sauerberg; chief technology officer Joe Simon; and Andrew Siegel, who heads business development for Advance publications, Conde’s parent company. Conde says it will bring in other outside directors besides Ohanian.

“We don’t want Redditors to think that anything has changed from their perspective, other than that the company has the ability to just go do things,” says Ohanian. In the past, Reddit employees have complained that Conde hasn’t given them enough resources to maintain the site, which now attracts some 20 million users who generate 1.5 billion page views per month.

The move comes after Conde talked to several investors about selling off a chunk of the company as part of the spinout; at the time, it had floated the notion of a $200 million valuation. The Conde party line is that they’re still open to the possibility but don’t need to do it.

“We think right now we have no need to take in outside funding,” says Steve Newhouse, who runs digital operations for Advance. “We can set up a structure that has the benefits of outside influence, without giving up equity to an outside firm.”

You can forgive outsiders if they look at what Conde is doing and scratch their heads: The company used to be owned by Conde Nast. And now it’s still owned by Conde Nast. So it’s non-news, right?

Sort of. But even if nothing else happens to Reddit’s corporate structure from here on out, there’s something to be said for operating outside of a corporate parent’s org chart, even if they hold the keys/run the table/pick your metaphor. That happens to be how AllThingsD operates — in our case, the corporate umbrella belongs to News Corp. — and I can tell you that from an employee’s perspective it’s a pretty effective set-up.

Fark Fends Off a Patent Troll

Peter Kafka — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 17:14:07 +0000

If the rash of recent tech patent stories has made your eyes glaze over, try this one: The language, at least, is much more exciting.

Fark.com publisher Drew Curtis says he’s settled a nonsensical suit brought by something called Gooseberry Natural Resources LLC, which claimed Curtis’s site and a host of others had infringed a patent for “news release generation.”

The take-away is that Curtis says he was able to get Gooseberry to drop the suit without having to pay the patent holder a dime; he says he would have countersued but didn’t want to spend the money.

Well worth reading all of Curtis’s words on the topic, but if you’re pressed for time his Fark-ready headline will do: “Patent-infringement lawsuit against Fark settled for zero dollars. Also, patent trolls suck hairy donkey balls.”

Gooseberry’s original suit, filed in January, named several big Web publishing companies, including Condé Nast, Yahoo and AOL, via TechCrunch (you can read the complaint here via another entertainingly titled post).

Curtis says that Yahoo settled “a while back” and that Condé Nast settled this week; he says AOL is still fighting the suit. I’ve asked all three companies, as well as Gooseberry’s lawyer, for comment.

Social File Sharing Start-Up Minus Raises a Mini-Round, but Hopes to Go Plus-Sized

Drake Martinet — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 16:14:35 +0000

Last we heard from file sharing start-up Minus, the two-man team was still early in the development of their product.

How early? Founder John Xie was still in the dorms.

Now the minimalist Web service has raised a $1 million round from IDG Capital, which follows the $200,000 it has taken in since its founding in October 2010.

The first big check written out of the funding account was $117,000 for the purchase of he Minus.com domain name.

Xie characterized the overall round as “really a bridge round … we anticipate raising more in a year or so.”

Just to refresh, Minus began as little more than a well-made demo of some of HTML5′s drag-and-drop features (which Google has now added to Gmail).

Since then, the product has expanded to include drag-and-drop sharing of just about any kind of file, via the sharing method du jour — pretty little min.us shortlinks.

Other technical improvements include user accounts, a player for music files right in the browser and the ability to download a gallery of files as a .zip.

Of all the improvements, though, the seemingly natural addition of user accounts may turn out to be the most important feature as Minus matures.

With its new cash, technical co-founder Carl Hu hopes Minus will become “the place to share collections of files, socially.”

That’s a tall order, even if you ignore the legal gray area that this kind of file sharing might occupy.

As it is now, files that are uploaded to Minus live on its servers, which may create exactly the kind of legal headaches that person-to-person, torrent-style sharing was designed to avoid.

Legal sand traps aside, Minus’s intention is to “get social.”

But since getting that doesn’t mean anything in particular these days, I asked Hu to explain:

“Reddit really inspires me. It’s a really vibrant way to discover new content,” he said. “The way it scores content, comments and users is something we will be adding.”

He added that the vision moving forward is to leverage Minus’ super-simple interface to let users explore the content that has been uploaded, and connect with people who share things they like.

You can see Xie and Hu talk about their future in the video below, which I shot on a short visit to Minus’ mini-funding-sized office, complete with a recreation area and Hu’s ultranerd competition chess set.

[ See post to watch video ]

Family Site Makes Paying for Subscriptions Social

Liz Gannes — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 18:31:39 +0000

Social media companies like Reddit, Facebook and, recently, LinkedIn have found it makes sense to make their advertising social, too. This means building ads into the function of their sites and making them shareable and personalized. Now, the family history site MyHeritage is doing something similar with its paid services.

Tel Aviv-based MyHeritage, which has 57 million registered users, already offers subscription plans for larger families and premium features like timelines and matching to other families across the network. Its new “Family Goals” will allow families to encourage each other to chip in to pay together for those subscriptions.

In testing earlier this year, these MyHeritage group plans were split among an average of three family members, and anecdotally families said that by spreading around the commitment to pay for the site, they felt more invested in it.

It’s not that hard to give an option for users to split payments, so this may well be an idea we see more of as newer group sites like Posterous and Fridge experiment with paid features.

Hulu Hands Its Home Page Over to Reddit, Which Delivers Carl Sagan

Peter Kafka — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 13:43:36 +0000

Here’s a 100 percent confirmed, spin-free fact about Hulu: The video site has let Reddit program its homepage today.

Truth in advertising: This isn’t quite as exciting as I thought it might be, because Hulu isn’t really giving up its homepage. It’s just handing over a “featured” slot to the community news site with a …rabid user base.

Still, it’s pretty cool, especially if you like comedy with a nerdish bent, and/or Carl Sagan. The Redditors have voted for a selection of clips from shows like “Arrested Development,” “The Daily Show,” “Community” and “Mystery Science Theater.”

Most interesting is Reddit’s embrace of “Cosmos,” the PBS popular-science show from the 1980s, which features “Battlestar Galactica”-like special effects, a Vangelis synthesizer soundtrack and Sagan’s trippy/deep-thoughts delivery. Good for Laser Floyd and Neal Stephenson fans alike.

I've Looked at Clouds From Both Sides Now…

Nitrozac and Snaggy — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 22:35:45 +0000

Here is the latest comic from our Joy of Tech friends at Geek Culture, Nitrozac and Snaggy. Joy of Tech appears three times a week in the Voices section of this site. (Click on the image to see a bigger version.)

Amazon's Cloud Crashed Overnight, And Brought Several Other Companies Down Too

Arik Hesseldahl — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 12:17:16 +0000

The Amazon Web Services status dashboard is reporting an ongoing failure of its EC2 service on its servers based in Northern Virgina. Foursquare, Quora, and Reddit are reported to have been affected. I’ve got a call in to Amazon asking what happened and will update this post as more information becomes available.

A failure in the cloud is of course one of the fundamental problems that its critics always point to. Yes, you can save money and time and effort by farming your IT services and infrastructure out to someone else. But when those services crash unexpectedly, you–and scores of others that rely on the same infrastructure–are left to wonder what’s going on and when it’s going to be fixed.

As of now, ~~it seems like Amazon is getting the situation under control~~, it seems to be getting worse, as other parts of the Amazon service that are tied to EC2 are reporting various failures via Amazon’s status dashboard. Failures are showing up Elastic Beanstalk, and the relational database, and Cloudwatch among others.

Amazon’s status messages are below.

1:41 AM PT We are currently investigating latency and error rates with EBS volumes and connectivity issues reaching EC2 instances in the US-EAST-1 region.

2:18 AM PT We can confirm connectivity errors impacting EC2 instances and increased latencies impacting EBS volumes in multiple availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region. Increased error rates are affecting EBS CreateVolume API calls. We continue to work towards resolution.

2:49 AM PT We are continuing to see connectivity errors impacting EC2 instances, increased latencies impacting EBS volumes in multiple availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region, and increased error rates affecting EBS CreateVolume API calls. We are also experiencing delayed launches for EBS backed EC2 instances in affected availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region. We continue to work towards resolution.

3:20 AM PT Delayed EC2 instance launches and EBS API error rates are recovering. We’re continuing to work towards full resolution.

4:09 AM PT EBS volume latency and API errors have recovered in one of the two impacted Availability Zones in US-EAST-1. We are continuing to work to resolve the issues in the second impacted Availability Zone. The errors, which started at 12:55AM PDT, began recovering at 2:55am PDT

5:02 AM PT Latency has recovered for a portion of the impacted EBS volumes. We are continuing to work to resolve the remaining issues with EBS volume latency and error rates in a single Availability Zone.

Update: Here’s more companies that are affected by the outage, according to status updates on Twitter.
Hootsuite, the cloud-based Twitter client, is down because of the outage too. Here’s what the site looks like right now. Also down is the Hootsuite URL shortener ow.ly.

SCVNGR is reporting that it is down too as a result of the outage.

Discovr, an iPad music app, reported that it went down, but shortly reported its service was restored.

Wildfire, a social media app, reports that it is down.

Livefyre is down.

Here’s an interesting one. CampgroundManager.com, apparently a software-as-service application used to manage campgrounds, say it is down.

A service called Totango, which appears to do something with managing customer relations and subscriptions, had some issues, but moved some things around, and got things mostly working again.

ESchedule, a Canada-based employee scheduling service, reports its service is down.

ZeHosting, a Web host, says it is experiencing slowdowns.

Recorded Future, which bills itself as a “temporal analytics engine” is reporting an outage.

PercentMobile, a mobile analytics firm, say its service is down.

The Cydia Store, which hosts applications available for jailbroken iPhones, reports it is down.

Here’s the latest update from Amazon:

6:09 AM PT EBS API errors and volume latencies in the affected availability zone remain. We are continuing to work towards resolution.

Here’s another update from Amazon

6:59 AM PDT There has been a moderate increase in error rates for CreateVolume. This may impact the launch of new EBS-backed EC2 instances in multiple availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region. Launches of instance store AMIs are currently unaffected. We are continuing to work on resolving this issue.

Another Amazon update:

7:40 AM PDT In addition to the EBS volume latencies, EBS-backed instances in the US-EAST-1 region are failing at a high rate. This is due to a high error rate for creating new volumes in this region.

Updating again at 9:10 AM PDT

Amazon continues to post regular updates on its multi-faceted cloud services outage this morning. The latest update message came in about 15 minutes ago, and is reprinted below.

I’ve heard about three other sites that are affected by the outage. Radarsync, a cloud-based service that updates drivers for Microsoft Windows users tells me via Twitter that its service is down. I’ve also seen that Thrillist is having some troubles sending emails. Venmo, an iPhone-based payment service is also down.

This is an update on Amazon’s Relational Database service.

8:12 AM PDT Despite the continued effort from the team to resolve the issue we have not made any meaningful progress for the affected database instances since the last update. Create and Restore requests for RDS database instances are not succeeding in US-EAST-1 region.

And this is one from the EC2 team.

8:54 AM PDT We’d like to provide additional color on what were working on right now (please note that we always know more and understand issues better after we fully recover and dive deep into the post mortem). A networking event early this morning triggered a large amount of re-mirroring of EBS volumes in US-EAST-1. This re-mirroring created a shortage of capacity in one of the US-EAST-1 Availability Zones, which impacted new EBS volume creation as well as the pace with which we could re-mirror and recover affected EBS volumes. Additionally, one of our internal control planes for EBS has become inundated such that it’s difficult to create new EBS volumes and EBS backed instances. We are working as quickly as possible to add capacity to that one Availability Zone to speed up the re-mirroring, and working to restore the control plane issue. We’re starting to see progress on these efforts, but are not there yet. We will continue to provide updates when we have them.

Update at 10:17 AM PDT: Here’s more companies affected by this outage, as offered by contributors to the comments below: ELog.com, a sort of all purpose-notepad in the cloud is down (link goes to a Google cache).

About.me, which AOL acquired last last year is down, and is currently displaying a message saying “We are currently experiencing an outage.”

ECairn, a social media marketing app says it’s down.

Travelmuse, a vacation-planning site is down, though I can’t find an official update on Twitter confirming that it’s connected to Amazon’s troubles.

Web host and design firm Drupal Gardens has an blog entry on its partial outage.

PeekYou, a search company that specializes information about people, tells me it has experienced some trouble, but has shifted its hosting to compensate.

Gamechanger.io, a service that tracks live baseball scoring stats, is down.

I’m beginning to understand what it feels like to be a radio announcer on a snow day reciting school closures after another! The only thing is, there’s no kids cheering.

Update at 10:39 AM: Yet more communication from Amazon, who says it is making progress.

10:26 AM PDT We have made significant progress in stabilizing the affected EBS control plane service. EC2 API calls that do not involve EBS resources in the affected Availability Zone are now seeing significantly reduced failures and latency and are continuing to recover. We have also brought additional capacity online in the affected Availability Zone and stuck EBS volumes (those that were being remirrored) are beginning to recover. We cannot yet estimate when these volumes will be completely recovered, but we will provide an estimate as soon as we have sufficient data to estimate the recovery. We have all available resources working to restore full service functionality as soon as possible. We will continue to provide updates when we have them.

And another concerning the relational database.

10:35 AM PDT We are making progress on restoring access and IO latencies for affected RDS instances. We recommend that you do not attempt to recover using Reboot or Restore database instance APIs or try to create a new user snapshot for your RDS instance – currently those requests are not being processed.

If You Love Something, Set It Sort-Of Free: Condé Nast Mulling Reddit Spin-Off

Peter Kafka — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 22:00:57 +0000

Condé Nast, which bought Reddit five years ago, is considering spinning out the social news site.

The publisher would continue to own the site, but it’s talking to investors about selling a stake. Sources tell me it is floating a $200 million valuation.

Reddit, which labored under the “Digg-clone” designation for many years, is now a much hotter version of Digg. Last summer, it was doing more than 400 million page views a month; now it’s up to a billion. The free site has made some forays into advertising, but they’ve been very, very cautious.

The theory: Taking Reddit outside of Condé Nast’s corporate structure would make the site that much more valuable, and would give it a better chance to compete for capital, managers and employees alongside the likes of zippy startups like Quora, StackExchange, etc.

The employee issue is particularly acute for Reddit right now, as most of its original team has left the company and the site is now operating with a bare-bones staff. People familiar with Condé Nast’s thinking say the spin-off was contemplated before the most recent round of departures.

“We love our Reddit asset, and it’s a core asset for us, and it’s getting more valuable every day,” said Steve Newhouse, who runs digital operations for Advance Publications, Condé’s parent company.

Newhouse, who wouldn’t offer any other comment on Reddit, is also overseeing M&A for Advance. Last year he hired Yahoo dealmaker Andrew Siegel to kickstart Advance’s efforts, and sold off some stock Advance held in Discovery Communications to give Siegel a $500 million starter fund.

[Update: Reddit employee Jeremy Edberg says, among other things, that my report is a "complete fabrication". I stand by my story.]

StumbleUpon's Second Wind Continues as It Raises $17M

Liz Gannes — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 19:00:39 +0000

StumbleUpon, the content discovery service, has raised $17 million in new funding, according to sources close to the company.

The round is from Accel Partners, August Capital, DAG Ventures, First Round Capital and Sherpalo Ventures.

StumbleUpon is on its second run as a start-up. The company raised $1.5 million in angel funding in 2005 and was bought by eBay in 2007 for $75 million in cash. In April 2009 it spun out of eBay with its founders and most of that list of investors providing Series A funding. This new round is being counted as a Series B.

StumbleUpon–which helps users serendipitously find new sites, photos and videos based on recommendations by friends and other users–has become a major traffic provider for blogs. Recent stats put out by the publisher tool provider Lijit had StumbleUpon delivering almost as much traffic as Facebook to sites within its network, and far more than Digg, Twitter and Reddit.

StumbleUpon is now up to 14 million registered users and makes 800 million content recommendations per month.

Sharethrough CEO on Why You Should Care About Social Video Ads (Video)

Liz Gannes — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 18:34:23 +0000

Sharethrough is a new kind of ad platform: One focused exclusively on video and social sharing. It doesn’t make viral videos, but it does help sites create custom ad units that fit with the flavor of their community of sites, like Reddit and BuzzFeed. The company charges on a cost-per-view basis. And yes, it guarantees it can get your funny ad a lot of views.

In advertising speak, San Francisco-based Sharethrough combines earned media and paid media. For example, it helped get this recent short film for Lego by Pereira & O’Dell, which was rather nifty on its own, 1.5 million views in two weeks on various platforms.

Sharethrough competes with companies such as Visible Measures, TubeMogul and Jun Group. And together, they’re competing with more conventional video ad units, like pre-rolls. The various firms are all trying to gain visibility in the emerging social video ad market by releasing stats and forecasts. Visible Measures said social video ad campaigns generated more than 2.7 billion views in 2010, up from 820 million in 2009. And here’s a recent demographic breakdown of Jun Group data.

Sharethrough, for its part, said it is now signing $75,000 campaigns on average, up from $20,000 a year ago. It has also doubled its number of customers to 100 in the last year.

If you count YouTube, according to Sharethrough CEO Dan Greenberg, the social video ad market is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Everyone else probably counts for about $50 million combined, he said.

Here’s a video of Greenberg explaining Sharethrough and what it does. His company has raised a total of $6 million from investors including North Bridge Venture Partners and Floodgate.

[ See post to watch video ]

Digg's Decline, Illustrated

Peter Kafka — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 13:34:20 +0000

Why does Digg have a new design and a new CEO? Here’s one answer, via a handy chart.

This one comes from Christopher Mascari, a Gawker Media marketing guy, and it illustrates the blog network’s traffic from social media sites. Less than a year ago, Digg was the single most important social site for Gawker, Gizmodo, Jalopnik et al. Now it has been eclipsed by the likes of Facebook, Twitter and, a little surprisingly, StumbleUpon. And note that Reddit, Condé Nast’s “Digg clone,” is catching up as well:

The other big takeaway from the data is the story that many publishers have been telling in the past year or so: Social traffic is becoming as important, or more so, than search traffic from the likes of Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO). Last fall Gawker was getting 10 million visits a month from social sites; now that number is up to 20 million. And Facebook, at 7.7 million visits, now represents more than a third of that number:

Reddit Gold Offers "Friends With Benefits"

Beth Callaghan — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 21:44:01 +0000

Reddit’s earnest plea for financial help from its members last week worked so well that it’s decided to create a permanent subscription-level product with discrete benefits and requirements. Reddit Gold offers subscribers control over whether or not they see ads, userpage sorting and “Friends with Benefits,” the ability to add notes on friends. The subscription fee varies (exact details here), but is generally $4 per month.

Confirmed! Reddit Users Really, Really Dislike Pop-Up Ads.

Peter Kafka — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 11:30:43 +0000

It is all Apple, all the time in techland this week. Except at Reddit, where the social news site’s users spent most of yesterday obsessing about something else: A rogue ad.

Reddit is a Digg-like community-powered news aggregation/curation service that Condé Nast bought a few years ago and has more or less left alone. The publisher has made a very cautious attempt to introduce some advertising into the free site, but so far, it’s just toe-in-the water stuff. Because Reddit users really, really hate advertising.

Here’s proof: The deluge of angry commentary that dominated the site Thursday after visitors started seeing a pop-up ad that wasn’t supposed to be there.

The short version of the story is that Reddit says this was an honest mistake that wasn’t really its fault–it lays the blame on other Condé sites and Google’s (GOOG) Dart ad-serving service. But Reddit says it’s sorry anyway, because “we would sooner bludgeon ourselves to death with keyboards than run pop-over ads.”

You can find a longer version of the tale via Reddit engineer Mike Schiraldi’s blog post, which is pretty entertaining. And you can get a sampling of Reddit users’ reactions here, but be warned that some of them use salty language to complain about seeing advertisements.

Oh, and the ad in question? Tangentially related to Apple (AAPL). After all–the ad was for iPad carrier AT&T (T). But it was promoting the carrier’s relationship with Apple iPhone competitor Research in Motion (RIMM).

Reddit's Ad Experiment Is Good News for Condé Nast. Maybe for Digg, Too.

Peter Kafka — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 15:30:18 +0000

How do you sell ads on a user-generated content site frequented by people who love technology and hate ads?

Sell ads that look exactly like the content itself.

That’s the strategy that Condé Nast is taking–cautiously–with Reddit, the Digg-like news aggregator it bought a couple of years ago. And it might be working.

So says Josh Stinchcomb, who runs sales and marketing for the “business” group of Condé’s digital properties, which also includes Wired.com, Ars Technica, and Web sites for the likes of The New Yorker and Portfolio. About three months ago, Stinchcomb began running ads that look exactly like the story headlines Reddit users submit and vote on.

The only difference: They sit at the top of the site’s homepage and carry a “sponsored link” tag. Like this (click to enlarge):

The results have made Condé “cautiously optimistic,” says Stinchcomb. You can measure that two ways: Click-through rates for the ads are running at about five percent, which is several times more than the industry average. And readers haven’t revolted.

The latter is a real possibility at a site like Reddit, whose users are fiercely protective of the community they’ve built, and antagonistic toward advertising in general. Stinchcomb says about 20 percent of Reddit’s users have installed ad-blocking software on their Web browsers.

If Condé keeps using the ads–they’ve run them from three sponsors so far and are tinkering with a self-service version that would allow marketers to submit ads on their own–it won’t create a torrent of cash. Right now the ads are priced at a $7 CPM (that’s $7 for every 1,000 eyeballs Condé gets in front of the ads), and Stinchcomb says he’ll probably have to knock that rate down. (He says he may also consider changing ad pricing to a cost-per-click/performance model, which would be a first for Condé).

But even a little bit of money would be a plus for Reddit, which has remained more or less a revenue-free property for Condé, even though traffic has shot up since the acquisition. Stinchcomb says Reddit now attracts five million uniques visitors a month, up from 1.5 million when the publisher bought the site (per usual, third-party traffic meausurements are much smaller).

Just as important, if it works for Reddit, it could have big implications for Digg, which has a significantly bigger audience, but faces the same problems selling ads.

Digg has raised $40 million so far, at a very high valuation, but revenues have been paltry. The site is reportedly planning to start selling ads that will look and feel a lot like the ones Reddit is already trying. High time to start experimenting.

[Note to Techmeme's Gabe Rivera: Yup, you have sponsored content, too. In fact, we've seen versions of this model for as long as we've had mass media. I think this iteration is particularly interesting, though.]