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Reddit, the front page of the internet?
Reddit is an online American news, entertainment website that is being kept alive by its community. The company just started nine years ago when it was founded by Huffman and Ohanian. Today, the popularity is increasing more and more, even President Obama is a fan of Reddit. The slogan of the company is 'the front page of the internet'. Reddit, what is it and is the slogan justified?
Reddit allows registered users (also called 'redditors') to add posts by means of a link, own text, videos and pictures. It gives the Reddit community the opportunity to vote the posts up or down. If there are 5 positive votes and 1 negative vote, you will have 4 points. The score of the post will determine how high or low you will be classified on the front page or on a subreddit page. If a post is popular and people vote it up a lot, it will be more likely to be ranked somewhere high on the page. The platform also gives users the opportunity to subscribe to individual categories which are called 'subreddits'. This is created to your own specific interests and topics, for example 'showerthoughts' or 'explainlikeimfive'. For further explaining on what Reddit actually is and what is does, you can watch the video clip.
In the graph beneath it is noticeable that the popularity of reddit.com is increasing tremendously. The line keeps on augmenting. Furthermore, if I analyze the visitors by country, a great part of the visitors are from the United States. Most of the times trends start there and gradually will be picked up by other countries. There is a big possibility, that Reddit will soon be more noticed by European visitors. Especially, with the internet nowadays things can get viral in a heartbeat.
For more infographics concerning the popularity of reddit.com you can click here.
There are a lot of benefits to this news website. Firstly, people can respond anonymously, the two-way communication leaves room for honest feedback. Secondly, It could be beneficial for a company to appear on the front page of Reddit. Not only because of the publicity within this extensive community itself, but also for the fact that big news is being picked up by other media as well. Obama's presence on Reddit was for example for a lot of media newsworthy. Last but not least, as a marketer you often start with a preliminary research, before you start on a project. Reddit, can be a good indicator what is popular on the world wide web. This could give you an insight where to invest your time in or not.
It can be a negative point that the Reddit community is free to share their opinion. They can be very critical of promotion stunts, and by voting the link downwards people won't see your link anymore and you will be forgotten immediately. Companies asking or begging for upvotes can be seen as a violation of the 'Reddiquette'. This can make Reddit a hard platform for social media advertisers which explains why companies prefer to focus on easier targets such as Pinterest or Facebook.
The company is billing themselves as 'the front page of the internet'. This can be interpreted in multiple ways. It can be seen as the most important page just as a cover from a magazine or newspaper. On the cover, you usually find a short summary or headline of the most important news to interest the readers to turn the page and read further. It is also the page you see immediately. In my opinion, 'the front page of the internet' is a big statement to live up to. I would interpret the front page, as a page that you see immediately when you open your web browser, for example Google. Furthermore, to make a big statement like that, you should be big and indispensable. Their popularity is increasing, however the internet is for everyone to enter and there are still a lot of people who don't know of its existence yet.
On the other hand, the front page of Reddit shows a combination of the highest rated posts from all the subreddits a user is subscribed to. It is adapted to your personal interests and Reddit shows you the most popular posts on the internet, therefor it could be the most important page to you as a user and be the 'front page of the internet'.