Reddit Execs Ellen Pao and Jena Donlin Get Serious About the Site's Business (Q&A)
Reddit is one of the biggest sites on the Web. Now it just needs to start making it rain. — Since 2005, the online community message board and link-sharing site has risen from an esoteric bulletin board service …
Context & Ripple Effects
By its own 2013 numbers Reddit was already one of the biggest properties on the Web — 56 billion pageviews, up over 50% year over year, 731 million unique visitors and roughly 41 million posts — but the company's stated route to profitability ran through odd channels like expanding the Reddit Gifts geek-culture marketplace rather than a serious ad business. A February 2014 launch of a live-reporting feature had also begun repositioning Reddit as a journalistic entity, which raises the stakes of how the site presents itself to brands.
This Q&A with Ellen Pao and Jena Donlin is the moment Reddit's leadership stops treating that gap as someone else's problem: Pao brings strategic weight and Donlin the commercial mandate to a site that has historically sold itself informally. The complication is reputational — critics have framed Reddit as a more restrained version of 4chan, a comparison that hangs over every attempt to court mainstream advertisers.
First-order effects
- Donlin's commercial team must now convert Reddit's scale — 90 million unique visitors a month in 2013 — into structured advertiser commitments, replacing the self-serve formats and Reddit Gifts commerce the site leaned on through 2013.
- Pao's involvement means community-facing product moves, like February's live-reporting feature, get weighed against revenue potential inside the company rather than treated as pure engagement plays.
Second-order effects
- Mainstream brand advertisers gain a professional sales counterpart on Reddit, shifting budget conversations toward community platforms that previously had no one to buy from formally.
- Commercialization pressure lands on Reddit's volunteer-moderated communities — the inventory is produced by unpaid users, so any heavier ad load tests exactly the pseudonymous culture that critics say makes the site a hard sell next to 4chan comparisons.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the largest user-generated communities institutionalize sales organizations on top of volunteer-run content, and each has to locate the line where monetization starts eroding the norms that create the audience.
- Reddit's reliance on Reddit Gifts signals that community sites may need commerce and non-advertising revenue alongside display ads, since their users are precisely the ones most hostile to conventional ad experiences.
The trend: Community-driven platforms built on volunteer labor are professionalizing their business operations, betting that structured ad sales and commerce can finally monetize scale they grew organically.