- Charge $10 a year to keep a subreddit name registered. 500k subreddits, say one half to two thirds pony up, thats $2.5 - 3.3 mil/year.
- There is a "trending subreddit" section. Implement a bidding system for a daily "featured subreddit" section similar to this (implement a N day cooldown so larger subs can't buy everyday)
- Implement a rev-share system with sub-reddit owners. Paying for a subreddit name could mean no ads, however if the owner wants, they can turn on ads and split the commission with reddit.
- Advertise (a little heavier than now) to only non-signed in users.
Basically I'm thinking you try and get the subreddit owners to help foot the bill since they are generally the ones getting the most value from the community engine that is reddit.
This is a terrible, terrible idea. The mods of each subreddit are what keep the subreddit alive, and subreddits are the building blocks of Reddit. There are mods who put tons and tons of time maintaining the quality of their sub(s), and they are volunteers and don't get paid for any of their work. Asking them to "pony up" their own money would, with no doubt in my mind, drive them away and completely destroy Reddit. You are grossly over-estimating the number of mods who would "help foot the bill," and completely forgetting about how much hatred Reddit would get form the community if this was implemented.
If Reddit considered this strategy for monetization, they'd be much better off shooting off their foot, then shooting their other foot.
Moderators are the people who govern a subreddit, so naturally they are the ones who are most invested in a subreddit, and ones who will have to pay the bill each month if no one else volunteers, or watch their sub die.
> I as a user would certainly pay $10/yr to keep subreddits I care most about going on.
How many subreddits and how many years would you be willing to do this for? This might be feasible for subs like r/AskReddit, r/iama, and the other big ones, but as many other people in this thread have mentioned, "powerhouse" Reddit users are the ones that don't follow the terrible front page subs, and have found their niche. One of my favorite subs to go to, r/tabbletennis, has only about 2k subscribers, and I'm sure that there are more subs that certain people love, but have even less subscribers.
My point is that the logical point for payment would be through a mod, and I'm sure that outside of the larger subs, mods would be the ones footing the bill. This is a very dangerous game as mods are the pillars upon which Reddit stand, and aggravating them would pretty much be the death of Reddit.
I see two valuable things for the end user at reddiit:
a. Finding good sub reddits (out of 500k am sure that is a pain)
b. Getting their content some sort of traction in the community which is ofcourse mod configured & rev shared with the mod maybe.
Do you think users would pay for this? besides, do you think the 2nd point has a scope of creeping in poop?
I agree that there are users who would pay for that. Indeed, there are successful business models based on this idea already. Those models see nothing like the traffic that Reddit gets, so they are not as interesting to advertisers.
Yes, i see point b) having a scope of creeping in poop.
I'm pretty sure that point b) was a large part of the reason for the downfall of Digg.
The mods of each subreddit are also what kill it. There are people who squash subreddit names just for the lulz[1]. Furthermore, moderator hierarchy is solely based on the date of when they accepted the moderator invitation, which cannot be changed it any way -- if you want to change the hierarchy, someone at the top needs to remove all moderators and re-invite them in the exact order, making sure not to invite anyone before the previous invitation has been accepted, since the timestamp of when you accepted the invitation, not the timestamp of when you were invited, makes the hierarchy.
That system on its own is atrocious, but reddit admins also will leave subreddits suffering from moderator abuse to rot, suggesting to split the userbase by having those not happy with the status quo create a new subreddit. While this is common practice on IRC networks, too, they have more differentiated systems.
Rizon provides a channel takeover policy, which is based on people with minimal access actively requesting foundership over a channel[2], implying that they do care. reddit has /r/redditrequest, but it has intransparent times for how long a reddit request is allowed to stay unanswered, and you can't "skip" moderators higher in the moderation list[3], unlike Rizon's takeover policy, where you can do so if nobody else claims the channel during the three-day grace period. Undernet has a very strict timeout on channel managers (or founders), 21+ days of inactivity allows for a vote by the highest-ranking ops for a new manager[4].
reddit is thus intentionally staying in the past, refusing to deal with a long-standing issue, for which proposals have been made numerous times.
Now, the nice thing about paying money for a subreddit name (which, given the current size of reddit, cannot possibly hold worth comparable to a good domain name) is that it requires a commitment. At least someone on the moderation staff will have to actually shell out money, a limited resource. Instead of solving the moderation/subreddit squashing issue through the way of administrator intervention/software development, which has repeatedly been ignored (search for "mod" on /r/ideasfortheadmins for a bit), it could be solved through requiring active commitment.
Similarly, IRC networks are all run by volunteers who don't get paid for their work, and there are people paying money to keep servers running. While this completely breaks the subreddit <-> IRC channel analogy I've been making above, it still needs to be said. It's not like doing things for free implies that you get things for free.
As for reddit getting backlash over changes? Just check the last two /r/changelog posts, full of angry comments[5]. I don't think they're going to care, so what's there to stop them from charging money for subreddit names?
Could you walk me through your thinking around this?
> Basically I'm thinking you try and get the subreddit owners to help foot the bill since they are generally the ones getting the most value from the community engine that is reddit.
From my own perspective, as a moderator of a subreddit of 40,000 subscribers, the community get the most value from the moderators. We work for nothing because we want to help the community. If there is a good, ethical way to profit off of this I am missing, please let me know.
Mods would pay nothing. One person who owns the "domain" (sub-reddit) pays 10 dollars per year. And it was just some food for thought. I'm not advocating it, but reddit does need a better influx of cash then the gilding system I think.
I agree reddit needs to find a better monetization system, ideally one that positively impacts users.
I would point out that, at least for the sub I run, nobody is really considered the owner. The original registrant is inactive, and there's no head mod.
50% to 66%? You never see such massive conversion rates in anything on the web. It would be closer to 3% to 5%. That leaves $250,000 per year. Most of those 500,000 subreddits are not overly active. 450,000 of those are so unused they're not even candidates for subscriptions.
In the process, that tiny $250k you yield, would destroy Reddit by shutting down at least 95% of all subreddits.
3 - 5% is all you need to keep half the subreddits alive. If 3 - 5% of the users are willing to pay then about half the subreddits will stay alive since, if the owner is unwilling to pay, chances are some user of that subreddit is willing to pay.
- Charge $10 a year to keep a subreddit name registered. 500k subreddits, say one half to two thirds pony up, thats $2.5 - 3.3 mil/year.
- There is a "trending subreddit" section. Implement a bidding system for a daily "featured subreddit" section similar to this (implement a N day cooldown so larger subs can't buy everyday)
- Implement a rev-share system with sub-reddit owners. Paying for a subreddit name could mean no ads, however if the owner wants, they can turn on ads and split the commission with reddit.
- Advertise (a little heavier than now) to only non-signed in users.
Basically I'm thinking you try and get the subreddit owners to help foot the bill since they are generally the ones getting the most value from the community engine that is reddit.