Wired acquires news ranking site, Reddit
Wired Digital, the SF company that owns Wired magazine and Wired News, has acquired Reddit.com, a news site that lets its users select and rank web content
The purchase price is unknown, suggesting it wasn’t for much, but the Boston start-up was founded only last year, and was built on a mere $100,000 in funding. It is a competitor to San Francisco’s Digg, though is the lesser known.
Wired’s parent company, Condé Nast, has used Reddit technology to launch a beta site, Lipstick.com, focused on celebrity news. The company said it hopes the Reddit acquisition will bolster Condé Nast’s presence online.
Reddit’s four founders, based in Boston, will relocate to San Francisco. They received $100,000 funding from seed investor Paul Graham’s group, Y Combinator.
The four founders of Reddit are Steve Huffman, Alexis Ohanian, Aaron Swartz, and Chris Slowe. TechCrunch says the company averages 70,000 daily unique visitors.
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
