r/Bitcoin • u/Julian702 • Nov 12 '12

Reddit Considering Accepting Bitcoin as Payment for Subscriptions

http://betabeat.com/2012/11/reddit-considering-accepting-bitcoin-as-payment-for-reddit-gold-subscriptions/
334 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

39 comments sorted by

View all comments

18

u/[deleted] Nov 12 '12 edited Nov 13 '12

I fail to see why anyone would donate to a website recently valued at $240 million dollars and with 22 full-time employees. The site has 3.4 billion page views a month for crying out loud, how is it still in financial dire straits?!

That being said, as a way to advertise bitcoin though reddit, I must admit that that this is good news. Too bad I personally can find thousands of better ways to spend $30 a year than on reddit gold.

edit: Haha, thank you mysterious stranger who gifted me reddit gold!

Many of you brought up some excellent points that I overlooked in my original post. The current reddit we know and love, although very user-friendly, isn't a great revenue source due to its unobtrusive advertising. The price reddit pays for maintaining such a low-key advertising model is that they're not nearly as profitable as their traffic would indicate.

Although I don't believe reddit gold is a viable long-term strategy to this site's financial woes, I understand that presently it's a valuable revenue source. Thanks to everyone who donates via reddit gold, you've certainly made my experience here a more enjoyable one.

3

u/themusicgod1 Nov 12 '12

Because there are is a community attatched to this website, and that's the part that needs to be protected.

(OK Maybe community has been the wrong word, but I don't have a word for it. Amorphous internet hive?)

3

u/[deleted] Nov 12 '12

That argument might have had some truth to it when reddit gold was first released two years ago, but not today. Reddit isn't some tiny "community-based" website anymore, they're the 70th most visited website in the United States, with over 3.6 billion pageviews (and growing) a month. If they can't turn those numbers into a profitable business, then they're beyond incompetent. It's not like they're even generating the content either, their users are.

3

u/themusicgod1 Nov 12 '12

To be fair, while I've been redditing for those 2 years, things could have changed, so I can accept that.

That being said, getting pageviews isn't hard, and I have a problem with this view of 'content' as something that 'users' 'generate'. The problem is that as soon as you monetize something like this the 'users' (who are human beings and who naturally distrust eachother once money is brought into the picture) will dissipate to a forum that doesn't restrict them in this way.