By Jessica Roy 3/21 1:28pm

Planet Reddit

(Photo: Reddit)

Reddit Adopts New Ad System, Adzerk, Allowing Users to Up and Downvote Sidebar Ads

Reddit announced today that it will begin phasing out its own in-house advertising platform and Doubleclick for Publishers in favor of Adzerk, a system used by companies like StackExchange and Stack Overflow. In a blog post, Reddit said the site will continue to serve ads, many of them images, in the right sidebar of posts, but Adzerk will now give users the ability to vote ads up or down, helping to train the system to better tailor its ads based on the user’s taste. (Though unlike user submitted posts, no karma is involved.) Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 1/09 5:35pm

Planet Reddit

reddit-alien

Source: Reddit’s Angel Round Comes with ‘Outrageous’ Terms

Earlier today AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka offered up a new spin on rumors roiling that Reddit is trying to raise a round of outside funding.

This past Sunday, TechCrunch reported that Reddit is in the process of raising venture capital at a $400 million valuation. Thanks to a banner year that included an AMA from President Obama, 37 billion pageviews and 400 million unique visitors, TechCrunch said Reddit could now command double the valuation it had in early 2011 before its owners Conde Nast spun it out as a standalone operation. Reddit is still fully owned by Advance Publications, the parent company of Conde Nast.  Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 10/18/12 12:45pm

Fresh Capital

Mark Patricof

MESA Raises $10 Million Seed and Series A Venture Fund Focused on New York City

MESA+, a four-year old venture arm of the investment bank and strategic advisory firm MESA Global, is launching a $10 million venture fund today for seed stage and Series A investments. The fund will be allocated towards companies in consumer Internet, digital content, advertising, marketing, and commerce and focus on investments in New York, from the Mesa+’s Union Square headquarters.

“Since its inception, MESA has worked hard to connect startups with our network in the media and entertainment world,” the company said in a press release, noting that, “we are a startup ourselves.” The firm has ballooned from four people to more than 25, including its three partners: Jacob Brody, Andrew Montgomery, and Mark Patricof. Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 7/09/12 6:45pm

Visiting Dignitaries

6460 inside hook martin sobey

Trigger Media Expands InsideHook, a Thrillist for the ‘Established Man’ with Help from Actor Ed Burns

In fiction, the experts tell you to write what you know. In founding a company, you’re told to fix the problems you find in your own life. So it makes sense, then that Andy Russell–a leading investor behind email newsletters like Daily Candy, Thrillist, Tasting Table, and PureWow–has decided the world needed InsideHook, another free lifestyle newsletter, but this one targeted to his own demographic: “The discerning, urban, established man who lives a fast-paced and rewarding life,” as the company describes it.

In a visit to Betabeat’s offices last month, Mr. Russell, who helped launch roughly one email property a year for the past eight years as a partner at the powerhouse investment firm Pilot Group, said he recognized the need to cater to the 35-to-55 set by looking at his own life. On date night, he and his wife would end up at the same sushi place around the corner. “My wife looks at me and goes ‘Again? Where’s the guy who climbed Kilimanjaro on our honeymoon?’ Or I used to own a restaurant in the West Village called Moomba. ‘Where’s the guy who started the hottest nightclub/restaurant in New York?’”  Read More

By Jessica Roy 6/13/12 10:52am

Planet Reddit

erickredd

Loving the Alien: How Erik Martin, King Bee of Reddit’s Hive Mind, Harnessed the Buzz

The top-scoring link of all time on the social news website Reddit is a post that users were never meant to see at all. It is titled “test post please ignore,” but almost 27,000 Redditors found it so amusing that they voted it up.

That is testament to the website’s impassioned community—and their brand of dry, often geeky humor (the site’s logo is an alien, after all). But Reddit’s user base, which a recent PBS documentary pegged as 72 percent male, has wide-ranging interests. Other top posts include a link to a news item about the elderly volunteering to clean up nuclear waste in Japan following the 2011 tsunami, and a Q&A session with the famous astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Reddit is one of the country’s most highly trafficked websites, but its general manager, Erik Martin, keeps a remarkably low profile. Most Redditors know the 33-year-old Mr. Martin solely by his username: HueyPriest. Read More

By Adrianne Jeffries 9/06/11 3:19pm

Planet Reddit

reddit cool guy

A Startup Is Reborn: Reddit, No Longer Part of Conde Nast, Seeks CEO

Reddit, the wildly successful online community for sharing links, news, memes and beyond, was bought by old media mogul Conde Nast in 2006, back when reddit was more of an indie alternative to Digg. But today Conde relinquishes the reins: reddit is spinning out into an independent company, reddit Inc., under Conde owner Advance Publications, and is looking for a CEO.

So, where do you get one of those, Betabeat asked reddit general manager Erik Martin, a New Yorker who moved to San Francisco for the job a few months ago.

“Sam’s Club,” he said.

Despite butting heads with their old media overlords over things like advertisements for marijuana legalization campaigns, reddit’s traffic has grown more than fifty-fold since the acquisition. But the fast-growing site never quite fit in at Conde, which owns Wired and The New Yorker and has a dubious track record with adjusting to the digital media shift, and the companies started considering a severe adjustment to the relationship more than a few months ago, although Mr. Martin couldn’t place a date on exactly when things got serious. ”We’ve always been very vocal about times when we’ve felt restrained by being part of a big huge complicated media company,” general manager Erik Martin told Betabeat from San Francisco. “We have always wanted more independence.” Read More