I think reddit made a mistake in setting the default as a one time donation rather than a recurring one. You want to get people to commit to a relationship when they are thinking about it and are motivated.<p>I donated, but who knows if I will even remember to think about it next month or next year?<p>It feels a bit like they're squandering a great moment of user and media attention. When they introduce a more substantial plan, the attention and enthusiasm won't quite be there.
I wrote this comment somewhere else:<p>--------------------------------------<p>They had 8 million unique visitors in last month:<p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu/comments/co29o/c.." rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu/comments/co29o/c...</a>.<p>To put things in to context, reddit ran a haiti donation campaign which was heavily promoted through their ad spaces and blog postings and individual "donation drive threads" and they raised $185k from 3783 users over a period of ~30 days. They broke their first 100k within 12 hours. So if they got 6000 people to donate within 48 hours or so, that pretty damn good, over next few weeks as they add subscription only features its bound to get much much higher number as it gets promoted more.<p><a href="http://dri.convio.net/site/TR?pg=fund&fr_id=1030&pxf.." rel="nofollow">http://dri.convio.net/site/TR?pg=fund&fr_id=1030&pxf...</a>.
I can't help but suspect that part of reddit's revenue problem just comes from how they display adds on the site. Instead of lots of relevant text adds, there's only one or two big graphic adds somewhere in the right column of the page.<p>I wonder if their revenue would change any if they arranged their pages to work more like Google search and email, with a string of text ads down the right side.
Breaking news: users pay for services they use.<p>All kidding aside, if I were still active on reddit, I wouldn't mind paying a monthly fee if I really loved the content. I used to spend a crapload of time on there before going cold-turkey, so at the peak of my usage, I would confidently say the site was worth at least a few bucks per month to me. Part of the reason is that I'm no longer a student and I've got disposable income. I wonder how many other people on the net also realize that their is a "cost" to their using the site, and that the cost is something they'd actually be willing to pay for.
I donated. I'm not a huge reddit user, but I certainly appreciate their candor and what they are doing.<p>I think social news is ultimately no good, however.