Condé Nast has spun out Reddit as an independent company, though its parent company still owns it all.
On the Reddit blog, Erik Martin writes, “This change is all about setting up reddit so that it can better handle future growth and opportunities. When reddit was acquired in October 2006 by Condé Nast, it was receiving about 700k page views per day. Now, reddit routinely gets that much traffic in 15 minutes. This explosion in traffic created technical, cultural, and organizational growing pains. reddit now has the kind of resources it needs to continue improving and supporting the community’s experience far into the future.”
As we reported last week, Reddit has been experiencing some tremendous growth of late. Over the past 15 months, it has tripled in size, the company said in a blog post. Since last May, we’ve grown from 7 million monthly unique visitors to 21.5 million. Our pageviews have exploded 4x to a staggering 1.6 billion pages served per month,” it said. “This growth brings new diversity, new opportunities, and new challenges to our communities. There are now over 6,500 subreddits with over 100 subscribers.”
“reddit Inc. is now owned by Advance Publications (which also owns Condé Nast), so even though the organizational shift is important, reddit is not really going anywhere. reddit Inc. will report to a Board and therefore have much more operational freedom than when we were a division of Condé Nast,” Martin explains. “Details are still being finalized.
Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian is talking about the news in a Google+ post. He writes:
The investment of time and love changed my life the day Condé Nast acquired us, but I never could divest myself. Traffic continued to increase, but surged after I left to volunteer for Kiva in Armenia (correlation or causation, I’ll leave to you) and the site — now one of the top 50 in the US — needs the independence its fellow online titans enjoy.
reddit has become the engine for creating innovative and influential communities online. I’ll do everything I can to help and guide the reddit, Inc. team and our CEO to grow true to the vision we’ve had since that summer of 2005. As always, there’s no reddit without community. Thank you for bringing us this far, I’ll look forward to serving you as we discover what the future holds.
The company has actually started searching for a new CEO.