Are you using video in your online marketing strategies? Did you know that 87 percent of online marketers now use video content?

Whether you’ve been creating video content for years or this is your first time, we wanted to share some tips on how to make your video stand out from the rest and go viral.

This is the first post in a series focused on helping you supercharge your online video marketing strategy. We want to demystify the meaning of the viral video and give you some concrete tips to help you make your own.

Here are our 3 steps to making a viral video.

1: Understand your audience and their viral triggers

Know your audience

This is very important — it is really, really difficult to make a video that everyone will enjoy. Trying to create universal appeal is not only a waste of money but makes planning nearly impossible.

Focus on YOUR audience, whether it’s new parents, high school students, or college freshmen named Ralph. Get hyper-specific.  At ReelSurfer, we draw an actual face for our target demographic and give it a name. That way, we can better visualize the emotions we want him or her to feel, when he or she interacts with our product and videos.

Consider why people share online

The average viewer shares video for a variety of reasons.

Peter Furia from Seedwell nails it when he explains that people share for two major reasons: “a) they altruistically want to share the enjoyment of that video with others or b) they selfishly want to be seen sharing or critiquing that video.”

In the first case, people will share your video if they enjoy it and want others to do the same. This is more likely to happen with videos that make viewers happy, like this amazingly cute dog dressed as a wampug from Star Wars:

In the second case, a person either wants to share a video they don’t like or is hoping to be the person who “discovered” a particular video. A classic example of video that fit this case is Rebecca Black’s “Friday,” which despite being a catchy song was mostly shared for other reasons.

Understand your audience’s viral triggers

The most important aspect of creating a viral video is understanding how to combine the two elements discussed above to understand your audience’s viral triggers. Triggers are what turn your viewer from a passive spectator into someone that will share your content.

Common triggers include videos that are surprising, sexy, or funny, though the rise of sites like Buzzfeed and Upworthy have demonstrated that there is a new trend for illuminating, shocking, and nostalgic videos.

Focus on one or two triggers and go “all-in” on them. If you are going to be nostalgic don’t just make a reference to something from the past, and don’t tug at your audience’s heart strings: rip them out!

Go for it like this Microsoft ad:

2: Optimize your video for an online audience

Post your video everywhere

When your goal is to create a viral video, now is not the time to be restrictive — post your content everywhere. Your video should be hosted on YouTube, Vimeo, and your professional content management system.

Submit your links to Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter and any other frequently visited site that displays video.

Make it short

Keep your video short — the average viewer watches between 15 – 30 seconds of a video, so lead with the portion of the video that is engaging.

If you have a longer video, use a tool like ReelSurfer to break it down into shareable clips.

Design for remix and meme-ability

Sometimes your initial video is not the one that goes viral, but parodies or memes that are developed from it can become instant hits. One of the best examples of this is the Harlem Shake, where the original video did not become popular, but viewers’ examples of them became a phenomenon.

Provocative thumbnail and proper tagging

Make sure to give your video a provocative thumbnail.

For example, this video (which got over 13 million views) used a thumbnail that was not really even related to the video itself. Maybe you don’t need to be this extreme, but your thumbnail should be interesting: a good thumbnail gets your video clicked on YouTube’s popular video list.

Also, make sure to give your video the proper tagging with description text that helps your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts and people who are looking for your video on YouTube.

3: Distribution

Unfortunately, nobody can guarantee that a video goes viral, but one thing we definitely know is that a video cannot go viral if no one sees it. After all the hard work that goes into making your video, put it in a position to succeed. The best way to do this is to create initial small groups of supporters to start your distribution cycle.

Niche influencers

This goes back to understanding your audience. Online publications and bloggers are hungry for content that is interesting for their audiences.

If you are making a video on how to cook the best lasagna in the world, then reach out to all of the Italian food bloggers you can find and include a link to your video. If you can show them how their audience can benefit from the video, they will be more likely to share it.

Celebrity influencers

After getting some niche recognition, the next step is to reach out to influencers with larger built-in distribution networks. These include YouTube celebrities, mainstream bloggers, Twitter celebrities, etc.

These people are harder to reach and are propositioned constantly by PR firms and others like you. So, it’s even more important to demonstrate why their audiences would benefit from your content. Keep your email pitches concise and explain why their audience would care.

Create initial groups of support

The free version of this is sharing with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc., but as social feeds become even busier, this is not a guaranteed way to get your videos shared.

You can also use a service like Virool to guarantee your video gets viewed a certain number of times. They use a network of blogs, games and other partners to make sure that real people watch your content. Again, this does not guarantee that your content will be shared or go viral, but it’s a good start.

Summing up

If you made it this far, thanks for reading.

As we mentioned above, no one can guarantee that your video will go viral, but we hope these tips will get you on your way to millions of views.

Guest author Neil Joglekar is a co-founder of ReelSurfer, a Y-Combinator funded startup that lets users create viral clips from any video on the web. Neil is a graduate of Stanford University, frequent guest speaker on digital media, and was honored by the World Economic Forum as a Global Shaper. You can find Neil on Twitter @njcar.

Image credit: Harlem Shake Background

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

It’s been years since community news sharing site Reddit has made a major change to how things appear on its coveted front page of popular submissions, but today the company announced a new feature called multireddits that could do just that.

Reddit enables its users to submit links or self-authored posts to a variety of “subreddits” (aka a specific category). The multireddit feature enables you to combine several of those subreddits together, which can then be subscribed to on its own. It’s worth noting that the capability to create a multireddit has been around for a while (manually typing each subreddit’s name in the URL), but now the Reddit team is making it easier to share and browse through them. Previously, if you wanted this kind of functionality, you’d have to create another user account and subscribe to only the subreddits you wanted to collect or create a new folder of content on iOS app AlienBlue.

“We’re working on making browsing reddit easier and more diverse,” Reddit developer Max Goodman (aka chromakode) wrote about the new feature. “The first step is giving you deeper control over what makes up your front page.”

The new feature is only available to those with a Reddit Gold account, the company’s premium subscription service that gives members early access to new features. Gold account users can choose to toggle on the multireddit feature by visiting a separate page. After that, you’re brought to your personalized homepage that feature a new sidebar on the left with a list of all the multireddits you’re currently subscribed to. For instance, you could create a “Reddit Pets” multireddit that contains submissions from subreddits like aww, dachshund, cute, and corgi. Or maybe you want a multireddit for comedy, which would contain submissions from funny, humor, and advice animals.

Each multireddit has its own tab that pulls up submissions in your main feed/river when you click it, and not all the submissions from subreddits you’re subscribed to on your personal front page. The new sidebar also adds tabs for all submissions across the entire site, submissions from subreddits you moderate, and saved submissions. [See screenshot below]

This is a bold move for Reddit and one that has the potential to really change up the way people are interacting with the site. There are certain subreddits that I didn’t want appearing on my front page, but would happily navigate to separately. And now I have the option of throwing all of those subreddits into a multireddit. It’s also a smart move because it keeps people checking their front page, a central location that is extremely valuable to advertisers and promoters, especially because the company is ultraselective about those advertisements. (And I don’t at all think Reddit will change its stance on advertising based on its strategy with multireddits.)

The multireddit feature is currently in beta testing, which means it could change depending on what works and what doesn’t. Reddit said for now, the multireddits you create aren’t sharable with other users, but that may be added in the future. The company is also providing an API for the multireddits feature for developers.

What do you think of the new multireddit feature? Let us know in the comments below.

Top image via Reddit Postcards

A legion of armchair warriors pulled together to provide a detailed account of all the information available on last week’s horrific bombings during the Boston Marathon, but not all of that effort turned out to be good.

Case in point: community news sharing site Reddit, whose users dedicated several hours during the incident to compile information into several minute-by-minute updates to the event. Some of the comment threads within those updates spawned their own theories about who the bombers were and how best to deal with them.

Today, Reddit’s community manager, Erik Martin, took to the company’s blog to admit its part in spreading misinformation and offered up an apology for the unintended consequences:

“However, though started with noble intentions, some of the activity on reddit fueled online witch hunts and dangerous speculation which spiraled into very negative consequences for innocent parties. The reddit staff and the millions of people on reddit around the world deeply regret that this happened. We have apologized privately to the family of missing college student Sunil Triphathi, as have various users and moderators. We want to take this opportunity to apologize publicly for the pain they have had to endure. We hope that this painful event will be channeled into something positive and the increased awareness will lead to Sunil’s quick and safe return home. We encourage everyone to join and show your support to the Triphathi family and their search.

To put the blame solely on Reddit would be entirely unfair, as plenty of other community sites (namely 4chan) and social networks contributed to misinformation that may have started witch hunts. Even CNN is guilty of reporting its own slew of wrong information about the matter. Still, it’s refreshing to see that Reddit is being proactive about the incident, as it’s been many times in the past. The site frowns on the sharing of personal information and has instructed moderators to remove and block anyone who disregards this.

“This crisis has reminded all of us of the fragility of people’s lives and the importance of our communities, online as well as offline,” Martin wrote in the post. “These communities and lives are now interconnected in an unprecedented way. Especially when the stakes are high we must strive to show good judgement and solidarity.”

Image via nComment

That’s the experience for many Reddit users today, as the site has been under attack by a flood of traffic — a distributed denial of service attack — that has rendered the social site’s servers struggling to keep up.

There’s not a lot of information available in terms of who is responsible, as no one has stepped forward claiming credit and Reddit only knows right now that it’s still under attack:

Site availability continues to be impacted by a malicious DDoS attack.

— reddit status (@redditstatus) April 19, 2013

Partial service has been restored — I could read the home page — and Reddit is informing those members who are able to connect that they may experience problems gaining access to all the parts of the site:

One thing seems to be clear: The outages are deliberate, not simply caused by a flood of traffic from the ongoing Boston manhunt for the marathon bomber who remains at large. One apparent Reddit employee, “alienth,” said that “the load from the Boston incident was measurable. The attack which is ongoing is orders of magnitude larger. We’re mitigating it the best we can.”

Reddit’s doing a pretty good job as the site seems to be mostly available now, if slow:

We’ve mitigated part of the DDoS at this time. However, certain site functions are disabled.

— reddit status (@redditstatus) April 19, 2013

Image credit: Reddit

“Bob” is an unassuming, 40-ish software developer with a big secret: He really likes cat videos.

But Bob had a problem: He has to work, and the American economy doesn’t exactly brim with jobs that pay you to watch cat videos all day.

So Bob hatched a plan: Aiming to get the best of both worlds, Bob outsourced his work to a Chinese developer. The plan was simple, brilliant, and completely water-tight: Not only was Bob able to do whatever he wanted while at “work” (like read Reddit and surf eBay), but he also made hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process. What could possibly go wrong.?

A lot, it seems. According to a blog post by the Verizon Business Security team, Bob’s antics raised a lot of red flags at his employer, which, as a “U.S. critical infrastructure company” saw the traffic coming from China and expected the worst.

Charged with the task of investigating the case, the security team quickly discovered Bob’s plan, which involved routing VPN traffic to his Chinese contractor and passing off the resulting work as his own. Worse, Bob had even shipped the contractor his RSA security token, which enabled the contractor to bypass the two-factor security measures implemented by Bob’s employer. (In case you were curious, the entire post is a case study in why companies should be more proactive about checking their traffic logs for unusual network activity.)

Sadly, Verizon doesn’t say how Bob’s story concludes, but I’m pretty sure it ends up with him getting fired — which is, if you think about it, not the worst thing for him. After all, you can watch all the cat videos you want while you’re unemployed.

Link Via: The Next Web

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

2012 has been an amazing year in technology.

We’ve seen the clash of titans in mobile as Apple, Google, and Microsoft have released new phones, tablets, and mobile operating systems. We’ve seen a single network connect over a billion people worldwide. We’ve seen the once-great mobile company of the far European north forced to hawk its headquarters to raise cash. And we’ve seen social media move from cutting-edge to mainstream as the Obama campaign celebrated four more years.

In every year, we see winners and losers: companies, devices, or operating systems. Here’s our look at some of the biggest successes and failures of 2012.

The winners

	Android What more can you say about Android? With 75 percent market share in the third quarter of 2012, the free mobile operating system from Google looks poised to take over the world.
	Samsung  Not many companies sell 55 million smartphones in a quarter. Samsung did, and it will probably do it again.
	Galaxy S III Samsung is hot in large part due to its top smartphone, the Galaxy S III. With over 18 million units shipped in the third quarter, and 30 million shipped in five months, it’s easy to see why.
	iPhone 5 Sure, it was Time’s gadget of the year. But more importantly, iPhone 5 catapulted Apple back into the smartphone leadership position, at least in the U.S.
	iPad Mini We called it immediately: light, portable, awesome, and expensive. And it even looked better up close and person in our review. But we had no clue it would become one of Apple’s best-selling iPads. And now that it’s probably going Retina in April/May, it’s just getting better.
	YouTube YouTube continues to be the online leader, by far, in online video with 800 million visitors and billion-view channels created by individuals and brands. Despite getting the boot from iOS6, YouTube just continues to grow, with 25 times the video streams of its nearest competitor.
	Twitter 2012 is the year that Twitter went mainstream, reaching 500 million users mid-summer and just recently announcing 200 million monthly active users. And despite major new API restrictions that soured its relationship with developers, a very public spat with Instagram, and an evolving shift from social utility to media company, the company continues to grow and solidify its space in fast-breaking news.
	Instagram With a sale initially priced at almost $1.3 billion and an exploding user count, not even a tone-deaf terms-of-service change that spurred a class action lawsuit and a possible exodus of some users can keep Instagram off our winner list.
	Google Android is hot — 75 percent market-share hot. Search is still a massive strength for the iconic company that runs an ad 30 billion times each and every day. And so Google makes over $100 million a day – and hits our list of hot companies in 2012.
	ARM With the vast majority of the chips in smartphones running ARM processors, ARM has people wondering whether the mobile juggernaut will challenge Intel for CPU dominance. That’s still a stretch, but not nearly what it was just a few years ago.
	Reddit With 3.8 billion page views and 46 million unique visitors in October — double the previous year’s numbers — Reddit is continuing its torrid growth. And it doesn’t hurt when the POTUS himself chooses your site to do an informal meet-the-people session — which required 60 dedicated servers.

Next page: The losers

Pages: 1 2 3

At first, he and co-founder Steve Huffman planned to make the world suck less by inventing a phone-based sub sandwich ordering app … in 2005. But after a spring break meeting with Y Combinator’s Paul Graham — before Y Combinator existed — and an initial rejection from Y Combinator, Huffman and Ohanian decided to create “the front page of the web.”

And Reddit, the site that had 47 million visitors last month, was born.

“Content was being created — even back in 2005 — by such a broad array of sources that no one source could really lay claim to that,” Ohanian said. “Unless it aggregated everything.”

So the pair took the ideas behind two popular sites of the day– Delicious, an early social-bookmarking site, and Slashdot, the first truly large geek community focused on news and ideas — and combined them. When they joined YC, the two worked day and night on the first version of Reddit.

“The only outdoor experiences we had,” Ohanian says, “were in Azeroth, the fictional world of Warcraft.”

The site launched accidentally after three weeks of work, after Paul Graham criticized the pair for not launching earlier. They got a beta version live, and Graham — unbeknownst to Ohanian and Huffman — linked to it in a blog post, giving Reddit its first thousand visitors.

Here’s the whole story:

As is well-known, Huffman and Ohanian created fake users and much of the early site’s content. But not for long.

“The day I woke up and Reddit was working on its own was just the most incredible feeling,” Huffman says. “It was, like, holy shit … we’ve got a thing that’s making a difference in people’s lives!”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Congressman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) took to Reddit this morning to answer questions about a recently introduced piece of legislation that would place a two-year ban on legislators and regulators from creating new laws or regulations that would negatively affect the Internet.

“I’m not advocating for no rules or laws on the Internet ever. But it has been made abundantly clear to me, and to a lot of other people, that both legislators and regulators have gone down the road of trying to take actions that impact the Internet without knowing their full effect,” Issa said during a Q&A session on the community news sharing site. “This is the case today both domestically and internationally.”

Issa’s new bill, officially titled the Internet American Moratorium Act (IAMA), seeks to put the majority of tech policy (regarding the Internet) on hold for the next body of congress, federal regulators like the FCC, and the White House administration. Issa said he modeled the bill after similar legislation that prevented congress from passing laws regarding an Internet sales tax for two-year periods, which gave the Internet economy a chance to thrive naturally and eventually allowed it to make sense in the grand scheme of things. For instance, goods sold on the Internet fall under the same tax laws as the state that you originally buy them from, rather than a universal Internet tax.

“The intent of this law is clear – it is to stop both formal regulations and administrative actions” that warp and change to fit a particular circumstance, Issa said in response to a Reddit user. “Often, government can exercise power without rule-making.”

Issa is referring to the power that the FCC has to regulate the Internet, as well as executive orders created by the president. One example of bad tech policy getting implemented despite failing a congressional vote is CISPA, which gave businesses greater leeway to share information with federal authorities without fear of getting prosecuted over violating basic constitutional privacy rights. CISPA failed to gain approval in the Senate, despite a rubber stamp of approval by the White House. And as a result, President Barack Obama passed a cyber security directive earlier this month that’s very similar to CISPA.

[Note: VentureBeat reader "CS" pointed out to me that Issa was an early co-sponsor of CISPA when it was introduced in late 2011. He officially added his name as a co-sponsor January 31, 2012, and was one of 106 representatives from both political parties that co-signed the bill when it passed a vote in the House back in April 2012 . While Issa should be criticized for keeping his name on the CISPA legislation, it seems he's at least learned enough to know that congress should take a break from creating new tech policy.]

But unlike previous two-year bills that prevented overreaching Internet sales tax laws/regulations, Issa’s IAMA bill has a much broader scope that includes privacy rights, copyright infringement, freedom of speech, and more. It’ll be difficult to pin down exactly what would be considered an “Internet matter,” without being extremely vague. That said, it’s unlikely to pass a vote by both bodies of congress, and even less likely to get signed into law by the President without an initial veto.

Still, it’s hard to label Issa’s actions as anything but positive. The congressman is actively seeking to get young, passionate citizens to participate in policy making in a way that hasn’t really been done in the past.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

With the sheer volume of new submissions hitting community news sharing site Reddit everyday, it’s hard to keep up with them if you don’t have lots of free time. This is especially true if you think Reddit’s front page looks like an overwhelming wall of blue text.

Reddzine, a free iPad app, could be a good solution for people who want to quickly scroll through the site’s front page or favorite subreddits (aka sub-category pages).

The app displays all the submissions, sorted by what’s hot, new, controversial, or top, within a 3- or 4-column design. For image-heavy subreddits like Aww, Pics, or Funny, the layout really shines as a way to quickly scroll through to find the good stuff. There is a “safe for work” mode that protects you from inappropriate submissions.

“Rather than staring at tiny thumbnails and constantly clicking through to view images and open links etc, I thought a more visual interface would be a nicer approach,” Reddzine developer Steve James told VentureBeat. He also noted that the app is likely to get compared with popular Reddit clients like Alien Blue.

“Alien Blue has its ‘Canvas; mode, and there are other apps such as Reddit Pics, but these apps only support browsing images in this way,” he said. “The idea for Reddzine was to support all types of content posted on Reddit (images, albums, videos, links and text), presenting them in a magazine-style interface, with large thumbnails and everything integrated into a single page app.”

Selecting a submission brings up a new window that zooms in on the content. Reddzine is integrated with Imgur, and photo gallery submissions are displayed accordingly. You can also access the comment section from this window, which allows you to vote, save, or share the story after logging into your account.

Yet, you can’t gain access to the comment unless you pay to the pro version of Reddzine, which is a $2.99 in-app purchase. Half of Reddit is reading and making comments, and without access to this functionality, the standard Reddzine app is very limited. There are a few things to note before upgrading to pro, too. First, you can’t get a custom “front page” that only includes submissions from the subreddits you’re subscribed to. You only have the option of choosing “All,” which is essentially what you’d see if you didn’t log in to Reddit’s website. The app also doesn’t have a landscape mode, which may bother some users who prefer the wider orientation when scrolling through news.

However, James tells me all of the aforementioned functionality requests are in the works. The 30-year-old England-based freelance developer is the sole creator of Reddzine, but fans of the app can look forward to new features like a landscape mode and Reddit user profile support in future updates.

For a closer look at the app, check out the gallery of screenshots below.

Community news sharing site Reddit released some impressive new traffic statistics today that confirm the site is continuing its trend of crazy upward growth.

The site brought in over 3.8 billion page views and more than 46 million unique visitors in October, Reddit CEO Yishan Wong wrote in a company blog post today. That’s double the number of page views the site was pulling in during the same month last year.

But all that growth also brings higher operating costs — such as servers to handle the increased traffic, hiring new engineers, and more — which it plans to pay for by revitalizing its voluntary Reddit Gold paid subscriptions.

“We have a choice to make: We can start running a bunch more ads, or we can give you, the community, more reasons to support the site with your own money through Reddit gold,” Yishan wrote. “Advertising will probably always be a part of our revenue, but we want to be ultimately beholden to you, the users.”

Users can pay a $3.99 monthly fee for Reddit Gold or opt for a $29.99 annual fee. Additionally, users can buy their friends a month of the service. The optional subscription gives users access to a handful of perks, like loading more comments automatically on a page, seeing new comments highlighted upon returning to a page, the ability to turn off display ads, and more. Additionally, the company is adding a few more perks, like saving comments and filtering saved submissions by subreddit (aka sub categories within Reddit). Some of the perks will end up rolling out to all users, but Gold subscribers get first access.

Yishan also said the company is exploring more ways to add value to Gold subscriptions, such as working with retailers to bring exclusive deals to Gold subscribers. If this does pan out, it could provide Reddit with another source of revenue (depending on the deal), without having to worry about pissing off its hardcore users with lots of ads and promotional marketing.

Well, almost all.

The top-rated questions range from how fast you can you type on the Touch Cover (one team member replied 65 words per minute, another said an astonishing 86!) to why no 3G/4G option (Wi-Fi is used FAR more on tablets) to when will it be available in $country, where country is not USA (no announcements yet).

One of the most interesting responses is on the Touch Cover digitizer, which senses impact and profiles key presses an astonishing 1,000 times each second to detect and ignore spurious contact … meaning that yes, you can rest your fingers on the keys just like a normal keyboard without triggering uncontrollable key presses.

Another insight when the Surface team was asked about cellular connectivity revealed that of the 33 percent of tablets selling today with 3G or 4G capability, only half were actually activated. Which means, of course, that consumers are voting with their wallets and not paying for yet another connection toll to the internet.

Other questions include one on whether Microsoft was working on a docking station, to which the Surface team responded that the Kickstand and the Touch-Type Cover is your docking station, offering USB and HD connections, and saying that “we specifically thought of this scenario and optimized for it. It is a pretty cool experience.”

And another that I personally resonate with focuses on the design philosophy behind Surface, something that I’ve admired since seeing it unveiled for the very first time.

The questioner, anexahhume, calls Surface design “a refined industrial look. It’s like Motorola products if they weren’t cheesy or ’80s-inspired, or Apple products with a dose of testosterone and a dash of fighter jet inspiration.”

Microsoft’s creative director replied that:

We started at looking at the software and thought about how to extend it into a physical product. We tried to stay away from any classic design language stuff, we didn’t want to have a bunch of styling in the way, we wanted to build a bridge between you and your digital things.

We developed the idea that later turned into the keyboard covers and kickstand. Most of the time we spent on revealing the essence of this idea: How can we make it comfortable to hold? How do we fit our connectors, and so on.. Step by step we found the design. The language behind it is a point of view to make a very useful product. I don’t believe in defining a design language in shape. A design language should be a consistent approach to execute the vision you have.

Using magnesium allowed us to make our product thin, light and strong. The color we chose lets the physical product fade into the background and pronounces the screen as the main act … a stage for your software.

One question that so far has not been asked is about Microsoft’s biggest tablet competitor.

When will Apple do something like this?

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

A showdown this week between Reddit and Gawker shows what happens when one of the Internet’s old-line virtues — anonymity — gets sucked into a vortex of poor taste and trolling, then gets dragged over the pointy coral reef of public attention.

Reddit, of course, is one of the web’s biggest aggregators of links, but it’s also a vibrant and often prickly community. Gawker is a media-industry gossip blog whose usual fare tends to celebrity sightings and sex tapes.

But don’t look for any links to Gawker on Reddit right now. The only time you’re likely to see Gawker on Reddit these days is if it’s in reference to the self-imposed ban many Reddit users have placed on Gawker and on other websites owned by Gawker Media, including Gizmodo, io9, Kotaku, and Deadspin.

Recently, moderators in over 50 of Reddit’s sub-category sites (called subreddits) banded together to manually remove any link that points to a Gawker property. The reason for this was due to Gawker editor Adrien Chen’s plans to publish an in-depth article that revealed the identity of a popular Reddit user known as Violentacrez (pronounced “violent acres”), a move that many Reddit users felt would struck at their right to anonymity and free speech.

In fact, Violentacrez was a powerful personality on Reddit, one who helped the site as a moderator just as much as he outraged many of its users with the content he posted. The controversy highlights the dependence that community-driven sites like Reddit have on power users whose tastes and sense of decorum they have little control over.

Despite the threats from Reddit users, Chen published the article yesterday. It’s a long, in-depth, and balanced look at a man who Chen called “the Internet’s biggest troll,” a 49-year-old Texan whose recreational interests included posting pictures of teenage girls, baiting users with outrageous subreddits about pedophilia, racism, and necrophilia, and generally provoking outrage.

As far as I know, freedom of speech and privacy rights have remained largely intact, which you’d never know by reading the comments on many of the top Reddit posts in the past day or two — the politics subreddit in particular.

And with that kind of negative social pressure beating down — the same kind of pressure that helped black out the most popular sites on the web in protest of SOPA — a lesser person might have killed the story, or at the very least toned it down. Luckily that didn’t happen.

For Chen, it would have been very easy to write a damning article that not only revealed Michael Brutsch as Violentacrez, but also summarized his shady activity of posting photos of underage girls, trolling the community with racial/sexist/stereotypical activity, and generally being bad at concealing his identity. Instead, Chen wrote a 4,746-word feature article that humanized Brutsch as a dirty but complicated middle-aged man who became a force of online justice when he wasn’t at his day job.

The article also offered a great deal of original reporting, including the realization that Brutsch had actually been a guest on Geeks of Doom’s The Drill Down podcast, which I used to co-host with VentureBeat’s Devindra Hardawar and Andrew Sorcini. Sorcini was an online power user in his own right, under the moniker “MrBabyMan” on Digg. (Disclosure: In this particular episode, VentureBeat’s Sean Ludwig was filling in for Devindra, but he didn’t speak during the interview.)

“Violentacrez has…certain fetishistic tastes, but as far as I know, he’s never done anything illegal,” Sorcini told me in a phone conversation yesterday. He’s the former top Digg user of all time, and has kept up with the community of other power users on Digg, even though none of them have any interest in the site anymore. He contacted Brutsch to do the podcast because he was curious about Reddit’s most active users.

“I did drill him on the controversy surrounding his popularity on Reddit, (and) I did get the sense that he had a moral compass,” Sorcini said, adding that the center of that moral compass wasn’t located in the same place as most people, who aren’t as concerned with concealing their identity.

This point actually made sense, and backed up Chen’s description of Brutsch as an ultra-connected Reddit troll, who had a surprising amount of power policing the site.

In particular, it was a quote from former Reddit employee Christopher Slowe that really opened my eyes to how Brutsch even ended up in this position. Back in 2008, Reddit was a different place. It had four employees and not a lot of money. The site was down every other day, and on top of all that, there were tons of people doing illegal things, like posting naked pictures of underage girls to its (now defunct) Jailbait subreddit.

“We just stayed out of there and let him do his thing and we knew at least he was getting rid of a lot of stuff that wasn’t particularly legal,” Slowe says in Chen’s article. “I know I didn’t want it to be my job.”

I’m sure Brutsch will undoubtedly experience lots of consequences. But that’s not the truly sobering piece of this entire situation for me.

As it stands, Reddit’s moderators decided to go proactive by voluntarily banning a website that went after their friend — mind you, not just the article that would have outed his identity, but everything that the site and its sister publications ever produce. They do this under the guise of protection, or a distorted sense of duty, or hell, just because they want to. And this would normally be fine, except that it speaks volumes about Reddit’s moderation police.

Reddit moderators that banned Gawker don’t really want freedom of speech, but they do want the appearance of it. They are exactly what they hate: A bunch of authoritative sociopaths convinced that limiting a few awful voices is necessary for the greater good of the community.

As for Sorcini’s contact with Brutsch, he said it’s been pretty minimal. The last time Sorcini chatted with him was six months ago.

“He’s unapologetic of his actions, but if you’re going to be that way, you have to accept the consequences,” Sorcini told me.

The last time Sorcini spoke with him, Brutsch was inquiring about ways he could transfer his popularity on Reddit to the much more visually stimulating social network Pinterest.

Artwork via nComment

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

With Apple’s iOS 6 update, the native YouTube app is getting removed from iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches. To remedy this, you can either download Google’s new official YouTube app for the iPhone or go with a gorgeous third-party alternative like Jasmine.

Jasmine was developed by Jason Morrissey, who is best known for creating the extremely popular Alien Blue Reddit client apps for the iPhone and iPad. His work on Alien Blue was so good, it actually surpassed Reddit’s official mobile app. (Seriously, even the site’s founders ended up preferring it.) And like his previous work, Jasmine aims to offer a mobile solution that surpasses what’s already out there.

“It’s a far lighter project than Alien Blue and doesn’t carry a lot of bells and whistles, but it may serve as a simple alternative,” Morrissey said in his initial Jasmine announcement. In my opinion he’s being very modest, though.

The app itself offers a clean interface that includes nearly all the same functionality found on the YouTube website. The focus is obviously on searching/browsing for videos, as it’s the first button that appears when you pull up the app on your phone. Yet, you can also easily access your playlists, viewing history, favorite videos, and subscriptions.

Overall, Jasmine just has a simpler navigation as well as a few nice perks that improve upon the original YouTube iPhone app. For instance, there’s a flower-shaped icon at the very top of the screen that allows you to toggle the night mode on and off, (basically allowing you to switch from a white background to black). Jasmine also offers a greater level of control on how it functions as well, with options to determine video playback, appearance, parental controls, and more.

Jasmine’s video player isn’t much different from Google’s official app. The biggest difference is that instead of simply giving a video a thumbs up/down, you can add a five-star rating to it. I’ve emailed Morrissey to find out why he chose to go this route, but since he’s based in Melbourne, Australia, his responses are understandably delayed.

Jasmine is available for free in Apple’s App Store, and will work on any iOS 6 compatible device. Morrissey did

President Obama’s Ask Me Anything two days ago was a massive success, as Reddit highlighted earlier today in a blog post. Not only did the page get 2.99 million views on the day of the event, it has received another 2.3 million page views already as of this morning.

Perhaps the most surprising stat was the number of servers Reddit added to handle the onslaught of traffic. In preparation, Reddit added 30 dedicated servers “just for the comment thread.” When that turned out to not be enough, developers added another 30 dedicated servers.

Besides telling you how popular and/or controversial President Obama is, that also tells you that Reddit can scale servers very, very quickly.

More interesting stats from Reddit:

• Peak transfer: 48 MBs per second
• Peak traffic: over 100,000 page views per minute
• Peak concurrent visitors: 198,000
• Peak share of Reddit traffic to the AMA page: 30 percent (average for a very hot topic is 2-5 percent)

In fact, Obama’s AMA is the “only link in recorded history to have surpassed the front page.”

Reddit’s popularity seems to be growing with no end in sight, with between two and eight million unique visitors every month and six to eight million pageviews a day. Obama answering questions on the site will certainly increase that trend and expose the site to a wider, more mainstream audience.

Obama’s most interesting comment? The recipe for White House Beer will be available shortly.

And from the president’s own tongue: it’s tasty.

photo credit: Chuckumentary via photo pin cc

Markus Persson, also known as “Notch,” is the developer and creator of Minecraft. The open-world sandbox game focuses on building, crafting, and mining within a randomly generated virtual world, and versions of it are available on an array of devices: PC, Android, iOS, and Xbox 360.

Minecraft is one of the most popular online games to emerge in the past half-decade and now has more than 36 million players (including 6.8 million paying customers), who play a browser-based version, a downloadable PC version, and most recently, an Xbox 360 edition. Its popularity is particularly impressive given that it uses a graphics engine that looks like it was borrowed from Castle Wolfenstein in 1993.

Persson took to the popular social news sharing site, Reddit, today to engage in an “Ask Me Anything” discussion thread, where famous people allow the community to ask any question within a specific period of time. The subjects of these “conferences” then take some time to answer inquiries that they find relevant, and the whole conversation — threaded across various responses and comments — is left up on Reddit for perusal later.

At this point already, users have posted 4,468 comments in the discussion covering a wide diversity of topics, including Persson’s opinion on the second-hand success revolving around his hit game, like the Minecraft Coder Pack and YouTube videos starring Minecraft. Below is a collection of selected questions and responses edited for clarity.

Searge
What is your personal opinion about the MCP project and it’s ability to decompile the game and make the source code kind of available to everyone? And how much do you think the fact that modding is made easy by systems like bukkit and MCP (and the number of available mods) affects the sales of Minecraft?

Notch
Personally, I used to feel threatened by it as I felt it challenged my “vision,” but on the other hand, I also know how wonderful mods are for games. We decided to just let it happen, and I’m very happy we did. Mods are a huge reason of what Minecraft is.

KillaMarci
Seeing as the YouTube community boosted Minecraft so much, do you watch any Minecraft YouTubers yourself regularly? Has any big company ever tried to “buy” Minecraft away from you or buy Mojang entirely? Is it true that you got bored of Minecraft and that’s why you left the lead developer position? If so, do you still get the urge to do some Minecraft coding now and then?

Notch
Yes, but I usually gravitate to their non-minecraft videos. Watching videos of Minecraft can feel weird after a while. Yes. We said no. I didn’t really get bored; I just wanted to move on to other things. I don’t get the urges to go back anymore, but about a month after I left, I missed it a lot. I tried not to let Jens [editor's note: Jens Bergensten, now lead programmer for Minecraft] know that, though.

SethBling
There are now dozens, maybe hundreds, of people making a living from Minecraft’s secondary market via YouTube, etc. What do you think of this secondary market? Do you have any insights on how the secondary market and Minecraft’s market have interacted with and fed each other?A side note: Thank you for enabling me to have one of the best jobs in the world!

Notch
It all kind of emerged organically. There’s probably a lot more we could do to support it more, so we’ll probably look more into that in the future. We’ve recently started partnering up with cool iOS apps by giving them more exposure and letting them brand themselves “official” in exchange for bags of money.

What else does Persson do for fun? Several users wanted to know.

ZedHeadEd
If you dont mind me asking, do you still play Minecraft for fun?

Notch
Unfortunately not. I used to play it quite a lot and find minor things to tweak, and now that I’m trying to stay out of development of it, the temptation to start “suggesting” things to Jeb is too strong. Besides, TF2 [editor's note: Team Fortress 2, a popular, online, team-based shooter].

MarioBGE
Heh, I recently joined a random TF2 server with you playing on it, and damn, you’re good. Also, thank you for creating Minecraft.

Notch
Haha, thank you!

SirHephaestus
Hi Notch, I was wondering: What do you do at home when you’re not working?

Notch
I refresh Reddit over and over and over in like four different windows.

Some users asked about Persson’s current involvement in the game as well as his experience developing it, and then Persson turned it over to Bergensten.

SuperAccordionDude
What do you think about the latest updates of Minecraft? Are they still true to your vision of the game?

Notch
Other than a few minor things, they’re exactly in line with my vision. The adventure mode stuff is looking amazing, and the way the team managed to finally properly split client from server is wonderful for the game. Jens told me some of his plans for 1.4 and beyond, and hopefully it will allow for more competitive gameplay — something I’ve always wanted to see.

DeadComma
What are the minor things?

Notch
They’re adding more half blocks!! And the script block? Feels impure. Stuff like that.

supercalu
Where did you get the idea for the way villagers look?

Notch
They’re inspired by the shop keepers in Dungeon Master 2 [pictured right].

robhoward
How much do your (Mojang’s) lawyers interfere/alter what you say in public?

Notch
None. I think they find it amusing. They’re great guys, by the way. They’ve been working as lawyers for game devs for many years and have lots of connections, and they like unconventional ways to resolve issues.

Other users focused on the more technical aspects of development, like using JavaScript or Persson’s new game, 0x10c.

daesoph
How much have you actually worked on 0x10c?

Notch
I’ve spent a lot of time on the DCPU specification and implementation, and fleshing out the game world, trying to come up with fun scenarios that I want happen in the game. Actual game content — not much at all. I did some live-streamed development and felt a constant pressure to move ahead fast, which built more hype that I intended and made me feel like I was rushing the game. Now I’m working slower on it until after PAX when I can recruit some other devs internally to help out, and I’m trying to talk less about it. My public enthusiasm for it builds way more hype than I want it to.

Zarutian
Someone had to ask, so why not me: Why Java?
By the way, I am addicted to Minecraft. Keep up the good work

Notch
I had been working primarily in Actionscript 3 and Java for five years when I started work on Minecraft and chose the language I felt most comfortable with. Specifically, my favorite tool in Java is hot code swapping in debug mode, meaning I can edit the code while the game is running and immediately see the results in the running game. This is super great for rapid tweaking. Java is not the fastest language out there, but I doubt I would’ve finished Minecraft if I did it in a language I enjoyed less, so I’m happy with the choice. Of course, when it came to putting the game on other platforms, we had to port large portions of the codebase — once for mobile phones, and then we had help from 4j to port it for XBLA.

Eiyeron
Just how do you enable correctly hot-swapping in eclipse? I ever wanted to know since the Prelude of the Chambered live.

Notch
Run the program in debug mode, edit the code, and save. It does not work for stuff that changes the class structure, but it does work for code within methods. Code is only swapped out when the thread enters the method, so a while(true) loop will never get swapped out.

And then, of course, the random, funny questions would pop up from time to time:

mollstam [editor's note: a Minecraft developer]
What is the name of your beard?

Notch
Steve?

TwirledOriole
And just out of curiosity, what gender is it?

Notch
Extremely male.

scottyb2023
If you were able to create a game console, what would be the main feature?

Notch
Laser turrets.

bumpfire
Do you use shampoo or shower gel for your beard?!

Notch
Sometimes. I used conditioner once, and it was glorious.

And finally, a question about Persson’s favorite time playing the game he created:

ChaosRegiert
Since you are going to be flooded with questions…and right now, I don’t have anything to ask that others won’t also ask hundreds of times….I’d love to hear your favorite anecdote about Minecraft or the development of Minecraft. What is the story that you like to tell people? If there is nothing asked in particular — but some kind of entertaining story expected. At parties. Or at the bus station, whatever. I just started recently. Love the game. Thank you!

Notch
The most fun I’ve ever had playing the game was back before infinite worlds when water had a constant volume. I joined some random server and kinda emergently just started to build a castle with a few people. I built some pretty good looking stables, then we got started on the moat and accidentally flooded it too early. In an attempt to get rid of the water, I dug down and fell into a cave, which proceeded to get flooded as well. It was not a pretty castle.

Obviously, a ton more questions and answers reside in the original thread, but it’s touching to see someone as “big and famous” as Markus Persson taking the time to engage people he’s never met in a setting that isn’t about marketing a new game or selling a current one.

[Source: Reddit]

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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While we would not advocate trying this yourself, there are many reports that it works, and helps stop Chuck Norris appearing on your dashboard when you least expect it.

There are two methods of removing the advertising, as detailed on Reddit, and both involve blocking the server that Microsoft is using to deliver advertising – rad.msn.com

The first method is to block the rad.msn.com domain via your router, if this feature is supported. After doing so, try to access the domain via a computer. If you receive a 404 or “security” error it means the address has been blocked. Receiving a 403 error means the address has not been blocked.

The second method involves using the free OpenDNS service, which can filter your connection and block specific sites. Instructions for doing this are below.

1. Sign up for a free OpenDNS account.
2. Add a network for your current IP address.
3. Go to Advanced Settings and next to ‘Domain Typos’, check the box ‘Enable typo correction’, if it’s not already checked, and apply.
4. Go to Web Content Filtering settings and set the filtering level to ‘None’, and under ‘Manage individual domains’, put rad.msn.com and select ‘Always block’ and then click ‘Add domain’.
5. On your Xbox, go to System Settings -> Network Settings -> (your connection) -> Configure Network -> DNS settings -> Manual, and enter the OpenDNS IP addresses for the primary and secondary DNS servers: 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220.
6. You may need to clear your hard drive cache before ads disappear entirely: System Settings -> Storage -> Hard Drive -> press Y -> Clear System Cache (note that you may have to re-download any title updates for any games you play after doing this)

Microsoft is keen for the Xbox to become a ‘true entertainment platform’, and its new dashboard, with its goal of targeted advertising, is a firm part of that plan. It is unlikely that the company will be happy for users to circumvent its advertising delivery system for long, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see this workaround being nullified in the near future. Saying that, those gamers are a resourceful bunch.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Redditgifts is best known for organizing the world’s largest Secret Santa gift exchange and the mid-summer arbitrary gift giving event (appropriately named) Arbitrary Day. More recently, the site has organized specific exchanges for books, crafts and snacks.

“We’ve been in close contact with Redditgifts for about a year. Not (to talk) about acquiring them, but just trying to find out how we could help,” Reddit General Manager Erik Martin told VentureBeat. Reddit didn’t begin discussions to purchase Redditgifts until just after the last gift exchange event in late June, he said.

For each event, Reddit users voluntarily sign up to participate in the exchange — filling out a profile of what they like and dislike as well as providing a link to their Reddit profile activity. Each participant is then randomly assigned a single Reddit user, who they will purchase a gift for.

The process of using a person’s Reddit activity to determine a thoughtful gift is surprisingly well-tailored for an activity like Secret Santa. (To better illustrate the process, I’ve embedded a photo of the first gift I received from the exchange: A microwave bacon crisper outfitted with images from the classic sci-fi TV show Doctor Who. Oddly enough, I listed only “Doctor Who” and “Bacon” as things I like on my Redditgifts’ profile.)

Since launching in late 2009, over 42,000 people in 106 countries participated in Reddit gift exchanges. Those participants spent nearly $1.5 million on gifts, according to statistics recorded by Redditgifts.

Until recently, the gift exchange site was run exclusively by long-time Reddit users Dan McComas and Jessica Moreno. As part of the acquisition deal, both will join the Reddit staff to work on the site full-time — with McComas becoming the Reddit gift exchange project manager and Moreno assuming the role of community manager.

“It became clear that what had started as a fun project had mutated from a fun nights & weekends project into a demanding 24/7 project. [The] 2011 Secret Santa is on pace to potentially have (over) 30,000 participants, and there’s no way Dan & Jessica could continue to run Redditgifts.com as a volunteer project,” Martin wrote in a recent blog post. “We wanted to see Redditgifts grow, and we wanted Dan & Jessica to be able to invest even more time and energy into making Redditgifts even better. So, we figured out a way to bring them inside the Reddit family proper.”

For now, the two sites will remain separate. If the company does decide to merge Reddit accounts with Redditgifts accounts, users will be given a chance to opt-in, according to Martin.

Because Reddit has dedicated premium advertisement spots and written official blog posts in the past, it’s easy to understand why the acquisition of Redditgifts is a natural fit for the company. The gift exchange site also fits in nicely with the company’s revenue strategy, which centers around non-traditional advertising/promotion that doesn’t distract or anger its passionate community. Thus far, that strategy is working. In June, Reddit members were responsible for bringing in over 1.2 billion monthly page views.

“If all this new relationship does is provide a way where [Dan and Jessica] can keep Redditgifts the way it is now and continue growing it, it’s totally worth it,” Martin said. “For some people, Redditgifts is the first introduction to Reddit. So, this is such a great way to make a first impression.”

The acquisition of Redditgifts also shines some light on parent Reddit company Condé Nast’s decision to purchase 285 Reddit-related domain names, including redditbuy.com, redditbook.com and shopreddit.com.

He is joining the company as the “lead cloud reliability” engineer — a prod at the company’s recent history of infrequent downtimes — he announced on his Twitter account. Edberg also indicated that the “cloud reliability” team was hiring.

Edberg recently left Reddit after working at the site for 4 years to pursue personal projects, though he didn’t indicate what he would be doing at the time.

Edberg joined Reddit when it first started, along with co-founders Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman and site engineer Chris Slowe. He served as the site’s “Information Cowboy,” which involved serving as the site’s systems admin as well as handling a hodgepodge of outreach, public relations and general hellraising. While working at Reddit, he joined Tracy Lee as an advisor to social food discovery site Dishcrawl.

That left Ohanian as the last original member of the Reddit team still contributing to the site. Ohanian had earlier left Reddit to pursue his own projects, which included flight search company Hipmunk and advocating for the startup incubator Y Combinator on the east coast. But he returned to his roots recently — like another prodigal son founder, Jack Dorsey, who  returned to the company that ballooned in valuation after he left.

Reddit’s user base grew exponentially due to a mass exodus from rival news aggregator Digg. That site decided to kill a number of popular features, sparking outrage among its members. Traffic research firm Quantcast indicates that Digg now has 8.2 million unique visitors, down from nearly 16 million unique visitors in August before the latest version of Digg was released. Reddit boasts nearly 19 million unique visitors.

Reddit is owned by media giant Conde Nast, and has about 10 employees working from San Francisco, New York, Salt Lake City and Los Angeles.

Edberg joined the company when it first started with co-founders Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman and site engineer Chris Slowe. He served as the site’s “Information Cowboy,” which involved serving as the site’s sys admin as well as handling a hodgepodge of outreach, public relations and general hellraising. While working at Reddit, he joined Tracy Lee as an advisor to social food discovery site Dishcrawl. He indicated that he would continue working with Lee on Dishcrawl in his official blog post about his departure today.

That leaves Ohanian as the last original member of the Reddit team on the site. Ohanian also left the site to pursue his own projects, which included flight search company Hipmunk and advocating for the startup incubator Y Combinator on the east coast. But he returned to his roots recently — like another prodigal son founder, Jack Dorsey, who  returned to the company that ballooned in valuation after he left.

Reddit brought on another systems administrator, Jason Harvey, back in February. He’ll be filling Edberg’s role while they search for another full-time employee to permanently take the spot, said Reddit’s Erik Martin.

Edberg didn’t specify what his next gig would be, but he fired off a number of personal pet projects he has been involved in while working at Reddit, including One Year Labs and Dishcrawl.

Reddit’s user base grew exponentially due to a mass exodus from rival news aggregator Digg. That site decided to kill a number of popular features, sparking outrage among its members. Traffic research firm Quantcast indicates that Digg now has 8.2 million unique visitors, down from nearly 16 million unique visitors in August before the latest version of Digg was released. Reddit boasts nearly 19 million unique visitors.

Reddit has about 10 employees working from San Francisco, New York, Salt Lake City and Los Angeles.

From January to May 2011, the site has seen a 37 percent increase in unique visitors (13.7 million to 18.8 million) and a 25 percent increase in page views (999 million to 1.228 billion), according to Reddit General Manager Erik Martin (a.k.a. Hueypriest), who added that the average time a person stays on the site remained an impressive 15.5 minutes.

Martin said he attributes the steady growth to members of the Reddit community scoring mainstream news attention and the creation of new sub-Reddit communities, which are sub-categories of the main site that focus on a specific topic.

Condé Nast, which owns the site, also made good on its earlier pledge to give Reddit the resources it needed to manage the insane growth. The post announced that three new programmers have been hired to join the team: Logan Hanks from Google, Keith Mitchell from Oracle and recent graduate Brian Simpson.

“Thank you to everyone in the reddit community who made these new hires possible — be it in the form of submissions, community moderation, brand sponsorship, t-shirt-ownership, adblock-not-doing, sponsored-link-buying, or reddit-gold-subscribing, Martin wrote. “It’s a very exciting time here at reddit HQ, and we are extremely grateful for your support.”

With the addition of the new programmers, Reddit’s engineer staff now has a total of five employees, which seems luxurious compared to earlier in the year when the departure of Mike Schiraldi left the site with only one.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Conde Nast Digital made a bulk purchase of 285 .com domains associated with the name of the company’s social link sharing community Reddit.

While the purchase was probably a defensive move to prevent others from infringing upon the Reddit brand, it is curious that the company didn’t make this move earlier, especially after all the milestones Reddit has achieved in 2011 alone.

However, this wouldn’t be the first time Conde Nast has taken its sweet time to do things that would be in the best interests of its property.

Reddit has been known to spin-off promotional sites (Reddit gifts, Reddit.tv, Reddit Radio) to interact with its community in many different ways. So there are at least 285 projects that now have domain names associated with them. Some of the more interesting domains include: redditradar.com, redditvision.com, zenreddit.com, and playreddit.com.

Neither Conde Nast nor Reddit has announced any particular plans for the domains.

Image via Bobsworth Industries

Ohanian left to pursue his own projects, which included flight search company Hipmunk and advocating for the startup incubator Y Combinator on the east coast. He isn’t the first founder to return to his roots in recent weeks— Jack Dorsey, one of the initial founders of Twitter, also returned to the company that has since ballooned in valuation after he left. Reddit hasn’t seen the explosive valuation growth that Twitter has, but it did recently hit more than 1 billion monthly pageviews.

In addition to Ohanian, the site is bringing on two Reddit users, one as a San Francisco-based general manager and the other as a user interface designer respectively. The new hires came after Reddit fell short-handed when Senior Software Engineer Mike “Raldi” Schiraldi left the site to pursue a “dream offer” from Google.

The announcement came through a blog post on Reddit, which indicated that Ohanian would also become an advisor for Condé Nast.

Reddit’s growth grew exponentially during a mass exodus from rival news aggregator Digg. That site decided to kill a number of popular features, sparking outrage among its members. Quantcast, a traffic research company, indicates that Digg now has 8.2 million unique visitors, down from nearly 16 million unique visitors in August before the latest version of Digg was released. Reddit boasts nearly 14 million unique visitors, according to the numbers it released today.

Reddit has about 10 employees working from San Francisco, New York, Salt Lake City and Los Angeles.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Condé Nast-owned Reddit, a news aggregator site, announced today that it is finally hiring some new minions to keep the site up and running after a large number of complaints about the site constantly going down.

Reddit has doubled the size of its sales and systems administration teams — up from one person each to a whopping two. The site also hired two power users in the community to manage its customer service complaints. Aside from those four hires, Reddit indicated that it plans to hire additional staff to keep the site up and running due to overwhelming demand from its users.

With any luck, the new staff will help keep the site from getting a case of the Tumblrs. Condé Nast, the site’s owner, doesn’t typically throw the news aggregator a bone despite the site’s periodic downtime. To get around that, Reddit has initiated a subscription program called Reddit Gold that adds a few new features and sells sponsored links on the main page. Both of those sources of revenue allowed Reddit to pick up the new hires — and to hire additional staff in the future, according to the Reddit administrators.

It is a bit curious that Condé Nast won’t throw additional support behind the site — or at least that it waited until now to do so, if they have any part of the new hires. The site had more than 1 billion hits in January and now sees around 14 million unique users each month. Reddit’s Mike Schiraldi couldn’t get into specifics about Condé Nast’s involvement in the hires but said Reddit Gold memberships played a large part.

“All reddit gold revenue goes right back into the site, either in terms of more servers or more people,” he said. “Condé Nast does not seize it to buy Picassos for the executive washroom.”

Reddit has basically dominated the news aggregation space amongst the geeks of the Internet along with Y Combinator’s Hacker News after aggregator Digg redesigned its site and sparked a large exodus amongst its users. Digg now has 8.2 million unique visitors, down from nearly 16 million unique visitors in August, according to traffic research firm Quantcast.

Reddit has around 14 employees working from San Francisco, New York, Salt Lake City and Los Angeles. It was founded by Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, who sold the service to Condé Nast and went on to work with travel site Hipmunk (a favorite of VentureBeat’s Anthony Ha).

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

‘Tis the season, right?

Condé Nast, the owner of publications like tech magazine Wired and social news aggregation site Reddit, announced today it has raised a $500 million fund and brought in Andrew Siegel, a former Yahoo mergers and acquisitions expert, to help the publisher go on a shopping spree.

Condé Nast isn’t much of a stranger to trying out new forms of media. The publisher has been on the prowl for some new, defining media sources for several years now. Its flagship publication, Wired, launched an iPad version of its magazine earlier this year. It purchased the news aggregator site Reddit.com in 2006 as well, which has since exploded in popularity thanks to slipping traffic at rival site Digg.com.

With the success of upstart companies like Groupon that have essentially managed to generate completely new markets, it’s pretty clear why the publishing company would come topside and start looking for new revenue streams. There wasn’t any indication of what kind of companies Condé Nast was looking to pick up outside of a cryptic focus on “digital brands,” according to a report by All Things D. But with newcomers like Groupon spurning offers worth at least $6 billion, the publisher is probably going to be on the prowl for fresh, early-stage startups.

You can pretty much rule out news aggregation sites in that “digital brand” spectrum, though. After Condé Nast acquired Reddit in 2006, it became a bit reluctant to send additional resources to the site’s owners. The site as a result periodically experiences traffic overload and outages. To bypass Condé Nast’s frugal attitude, it began offering a premium subscription that had some additional features for a monthly fee.

Ben Huh, the mastermind behind the Cheezburger network that helped popularize some of the Internet’s most popular memes, even offered to buy the site at one point. Site founder Alexis Ohanian said he would be surprised if Condé Nast agreed to sell the site. But he said the two would chat at some point. It isn’t clear whether Condé Nast hasn’t found a way to monetize the Internet-savvy Reddit community, or if it simply has no interest.

Hotmail team members appealed to the community of news aggregation site Reddit.com by posting an “ask-me-anything” thread today, where users can come in and basically ask questions about the service and get feedback from the Hotmail team.

But leave it to the tech- and Internet-savvy Reddit community to ask the hardest question. The top-rated question in the thread is why users should abandon their Gmail accounts and head over to Hotmail. The comments immediately put the Hotmail on the defensive, with Reddit users wondering why the service didn’t use some of the most popular email protocols that sync up to mobile devices and external email programs.

Hotmail has faded into a bit of obscurity after Gmail emerged as the clear email service to beat. (Though in terms of total users, research firm comScore shows that Hotmail’s still king, with 361.7 million users compared to Gmail’s 193.3 million.) Gmail syncs with the rest of its applications like Google Calendar. Google also has the edge in that a lot of companies use its email service and connect it with other apps, like Analytics. Google Apps has signed up 3 million companies with more than 30 million users total.

The Hotmail team said Microsoft is trying a number of things to differentiate itself from Gmail and make it more viable, like removing limits on attachment sizes and offering a deeper level of connectivity with its web-based Office applications. But file-sharing is really a non-issue at this point with the emergence of services like Dropbox. Google has also been in the web-based office game for some time now.

It’s not the first time Microsoft has ventured into Reddit. The company dove into Reddit back in September to help promote the newest version of its Internet-browsing application, Internet Explorer 9. The feedback then was pretty positive — but that’s mostly because it was actually a decent application. Microsoft even purchased advertising for IE9 on Reddit, a community that hasn’t traditionally been friendly to the black sheep of the browser family.

It seems the fangs are out in this thread as well. Best of luck to Microsoft while it navigates the Internets on this one.