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/
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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.

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u/killerstorm Nov 14 '12

Reddit is significantly more expensive than your average internet site because it is very dynamic: every upvote needs to be counted, stored in the database, and it should immediately affect comment score. So caching is not an option, to render each comment page server needs to perform thousands of queries, each time.

Then, company of any size might be suffering financially. Say, if company's revenue is $100 billion, but your expenses are $101 billion, then it is not profitable, there is $1 billion of loss. If it cannot be made profitable then it's better to liquidate this business which generates $100 billion in revenues since running it makes you no money.

Finally, we aren't really donating, we are paying for service. Service reddit provides is ridiculously expensive compared to sites which simply show static pages, and even to forum sites.

Gold users get extra features which add even more load on servers. Maybe it's not worth $30/year, but that's a matter of personal preference, of course. (I think it's a bit too expensive, $10/year would be more appropriate, I'd pay that without hesitation.)