Reddit Convinced Roughly 6,000 Users To Subscribe So Far

Late last week, news recommendation service reddit started soliciting users to donate i.e. subscribe to reddit gold in order to allow the Condé Nast-owned company to hire more people and buy more servers.

In a new blog post, reddit says approximately 6,000 users have donated to date. That represents less than 0.1 percent of reddit’s total number of users (unique visitors?), which comes in at roughly 8 million today, according to the company.

While only a fraction of its user base apparently made the jump, reddit has declared the feat a triumph, as the cash infusion enables them to add more servers to the fray, initially. This should benefit all users, not just reddit gold subscribers, the company added.

As reddit hasn’t disclosed how much money was collected in the pledge drive so far, and the subscription price was left entirely up to the subscribers in question, we’ll have to estimate.

Let’s say each user donated in between $10 and $15, we’re looking at roughly $60,000 to $90,000 to date. Six thousand subscribers may not seem like a lot, but it’s not a shabby sum to raise in just a couple of days, especially since the benefits of becoming a subscriber weren’t clear from the get-go.

Reddit does say it aims to grow reddit gold into a bona fide subscription service like Ars Technica, and the company is taking suggestions for which things to work on first.

You can follow the discussion on reddit here. Going over the comments, particularly those left by reddit folks, it seems like Condé Nast was really blocking the company in terms of resources for hiring purposes. Also, the company has only one sales person on staff, and she just started working there two months ago:

raldi
> They should be banging on the Conde Nast door begging for more cash
Did that. As we said very clearly in Friday’s blog post, the answer was “moar revenue”.

and

raldi
> How about spending 100% of the subscription revenue on hiring some sales staff?
Hiring is out of our hands.
> If your sales team…
Our sales team is one person, and she’s only been on the job for about two months.

Last but not least, the company ends its blog post hinting at a major new feature coming soon:

Oh, and there’s One More Thing coming soon that you guys are gonna love.

Any guesses on what this could be?