I love Reddit, but remind me what's their business model? I've never seen an ad using Relay For Reddit. Free content is great but how do they keep the lights on much less justify $1.7 billion? (Also, HN. Servers are cheap but how do they pay dang to tell me I'm being toxic?)
They run sponsored posts on the HTML version of reddit, not sure about their mobile app tho. I've actually paid to run some ads on reddit and would recommend them. Their ads are cheap and they'll definitely send traffic your way if that's what you're looking for.
Relay For Reddit is not normal - most Reddit users see ads occasionally.
Apparently 6 percent of internet users in the United States use Reddit in their spare time [1]. It is probably the same in Canada, Australia and the UK.
If we assume $0.25 in revenue per month per user and 20 million users, that's revenue of $60 million per year.
I can believe your statistics are at least somewhere in the ballpark. Thus, I still have no idea how you get to a $1.7 billion valuation on $60 million in revenue, nevermind profit.
Actually, I'm not so confident about the ballpark. My link also says there are about 1.3 billion unique visitors per month. So in addition to 20 million Reddit 'addicts' there could be 1.28 billion less-frequent users. If they are worth on average $0.01 per month that would be an additional $150 million per year in revenue.
> Servers are cheap but how do they pay dang to tell me I'm being toxic?
They don't have to pay dang for that I'll be happy to oblige, this is a toxic comment because of that last bit, essentially you are just stirring the pot and baiting the moderators.
As for the value of HN to YC: it's a recruiting and marketing machine the likes of which you'll rarely find for any kind of money, I suspect that no matter what Dan and Scott are paid it is well worth it to YC.
This seems pretty obvious, doesn't it? Your interests are the subreddits that you're subscribed to. They don't need to do any "tracking" because that's just how the site works by default.
Steve's tone here is pretty clearly tongue-in-cheek.
