How Reddit Cashed In On The Fappening
Wired – In just six days, Reddit earned enough money from the nude pics scandal to power its servers for roughly a month, says John Menese, the 33-year-old creator of a Reddit sub-forum expressly launched to share the photos. That statistic, he says, is based on how many times members of the subreddit paid for so-called Reddit “gold,” the $3.99-per-month premium accounts that users often gift to each other to bestow a few extra features and prestige. Each subreddit publicly displays the amount of server time paid for by its members’ Reddit gold, and Menese tracked his forum’s contribution until just before it went offline. His estimate of the site’s take from the sext scandal doesn’t include any advertising revenue the site may have made from the quarter billion pageviews Menese’s subreddit created during its short time on the web. “If Reddit had wanted to, they could have banned us on Sunday when our traffic broke their servers,” says Menese, a 33-year old salesman at a Las Vegas call center. “Instead, they chose to milk a week of publicity and a month of server time in Reddit gold before they stepped in.” Menese and another moderator of the subreddit, which they called TheFappening in a reference to Reddit’s lingo for masturbation, say that Reddit credited their users for paying for at least 27 days worth of site server time before the forum was banned Saturday. For comparison, that would mean it generated about half as much revenue from Reddit gold in six days as the site’s “programming” subreddit, the oldest on the site, earned in the four years since Reddit’s gold program was created. Reddit staff didn’t respond to WIRED’s request for comment on its financial rewards from its TheFappening scandal. But one administrator admitted in a long note about the staff’s ambivalence on the issue that it had “hit new traffic milestones, ones which I’d be ashamed to share publicly.” That immense traffic, however, already was waning when Reddit banned TheFappening. At its peak on September 1st, the site pulled in 141 million visitors in a day, according to numbers Menese accessed as a moderator of the subreddit. By September 2, it only attracted 45 million pageviews. By September 6, when Reddit finally pulled TheFappening from the site, the majority of the forum’s users visitors likely had moved on. “It’s sad that Reddit already made their money and then made a show of banning the site,” says Menese.
So if you’re a big time Reddit user, this isn’t news to you. But I am still like a lost puppy when I’m on Reddit. I look at the front page and the videos subreddit to find blog material and then I get the fuck out of there because quite frankly it scares me. I feel like I’m going to breach some Reddi-quette and next thing I know some hacker has stolen my identity and all my dick pics and my life is ruined. So if you’re like me, which I assume most Stoolies are, you don’t quite understand this “Reddit Gold.”
Its fucking nuts. Every time someone makes a really good post, other Reddit readers pay 4 bucks to give that person special unlocked Reddit features and benefits. Reddit keeps all that money and the person posting just gets like premium Reddit or some shit. You know how fucking nuts that is? Out of the goodness of their hearts, just trying to be generous and thankful for that post, people pay 4 bucks to a stranger?? Thats fucking fascinating. Can you imagine if we had Barstool Gold? You motherfuckers wouldn’t pay a fucking dime for any of our posts. If the bloggers were getting 4 bucks every time they wrote a great blog we’d all be fucking rich. I’d probably still be getting checks from ’09. I could have retired off the war with the Blindos and the Hondos. I’d buy a yacht with my Barstool Gold money from the Stupidest People On Twitter. Put my kids through college with the Top 10 announcers to give play by play of you having sex.
Featured on Barstool
But whats really fascinating about it all is how Reddit snaked it during the Fappening and still managed to cash in despite looking like they were patrolling the whole thing. What a savvy move from those motherfuckers. Grab a quick 141 million views and enough IDIOTS paying 4 bucks a pop to see Kate Upton’s tits that you could fund your whole website for a month, and then crack the whip and look like you were controlling the invasion of privacy. Best of both worlds. Love it. Thats why the internet is great. There still aren’t any real rules. It will always be the Wild West where you can make money off of all sorts of shit and nobody knows whats going on. Well played, Reddit. Well played indeed.