How to Monetize Without Hurting Your Community

At the Mashable Media Summit on Friday, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian joined Mashable features editor Matt Silverman on stage to talk about how to monetize a website while still putting the community first.

By doing so, Reddit hopes that advertisers will recognize the value. Ohanian talked about Reddit’s old model of advertising, similar to billboard ads, and how it’s becoming less effective.
“In 2005, we thought, ‘We’re going to get lots of traffic and advertisers will take care of the rest,’ ” Ohanian said. “Websites advertise like digital billboards. Now we can see click-through data on these ads and we realized: Holy shit, no one cares.”

Moving forward, Reddit intends to flip the tables. Subreddits like /r/gameofthrones have more than 100,000 active users creating content even when the show is off the air, just because they enjoy it.
“They are spending hundreds of hours making fan art, debates, propagating for a show that’s not even on the air right now,” Ohanian says of the Game of Thrones community. “You’re effectively getting free [advertising] from die-hard fan evangelists. ”

AMA interviews, short for “Ask Me Anything,” have been a valuable tool for brands to interact more organically with the Reddit community. They require a different marketing approach than Facebook or Twitter.

One of the biggest successes was President Obama’s impromptu AMA during the 2012 election campaign. Brands have utilized comedians and athletes, among other notable people, to act as a spokesperson through the Reddit community.

Ohanian compared Reddit’s plans to Digg, one of the site’s early competitors, which he says put advertisers over users, ultimately leading to its demise.

“When you take away the core of what it’s supposed to be about, the community is not going to be too happy about it,” Ohanian said.

Ohanian claims that Reddit still has a lot to work on, but it intends to find a way to monetize from the community directly — similar to how comedians like Aziz Ansari are benefiting from direct distribution to fans.

“We live in a world where there’s just too much data to ignore, and there’s just got to be a way to figure it out,” says Ohanian.

There are other functions of Reddit that the company does not intend to stray from, but rather enhance — for example, Reddit gold, a more ceremonial way for Redditors to show support for the network and each other. Users pay or gift $3.99 per month or $29.99 for one year as a Reddit gold member, which enables small bonus features like more statistics and the ability to subscribe to more subreddits.
“It’s a status symbol, and it shows that you cared,” said Ohanian.

Ohanian intends to expand upon users gifting “cred” to one another as a way to generate revenue that embraces the community, rather than exploits it.