Happy Tuesday after Labor Day everybody! In other news, beloved Internet hangout reddit has spun out of Conde Nast and will become its own independent entity, reddit inc., owned by Condé Nast parent company Advance publications.
In a blog post coincidentally enough entitled “Independence,” reddit General Manager Erik Martin implies that the organizational change was due to a combination of technical issues related to company’s ever-expanding growth and a culture clash with Condé Nast.
“When reddit was acquired in October 2006 by Condé Nast, it was receiving about 700k page views per day,” Martin writes. “Now, reddit routinely gets that much traffic in 15 minutes. This explosion in traffic created technical, cultural, and organizational growing pains.”
According to Martin, reddit Inc. will now directly report to a board, which will include co-founder Alexis Ohanian, reddit President Bob Sauerberg, Condé Nast CTO Joe Simon and Advance VP Andrew Siegel. Martin tells me that the company, which employs eight people out of its SF office and two out of NY with another salesperson based in LA, is looking for a new CEO in the Bay Area.
“It’ll be a much more direct process now, we go to the board like any other company and say that this is the business case for why we’re doing XYZ,” comments Martin on what he thinks will change organizationally moving forward. “It allows us to operate more independently,” he says.
Contrary to (hilarious) reports, Gawker writer Adrian Chen is not in the running for Reddit Editor In Chief.
Launched in 2005, Reddit is a social news website that displays news based on your personal preferences and what the community likes. Your preferences are determined based on your history of voting stories up or down. The company was started by two University of Virginia grads, Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman in the Y Combinator program. Two others, Christopher Slowe and Aaron Swartz, later joined the team. Conde Nast, owner of Wired and other magazines/websites, acquired Reddit in October of 2006....
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