Digg this: Reddit serves up a billion pages a month

(WIRED) -- Reddit, the community news sharing site, has now joined the billion-page-per-month club, having served up some 1,000,404,480 pages to almost 14 million unique visitors in January, as measured by Google Analytics.

That means Reddit, once largely seen as a geekier also-ran to Digg, has now handily surpassed its better-funded rival in traffic.

Reddit was started in 2005 by Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman as part of the inaugural class of Y-Combinator.


Conde Nast purchased the site in October 2006, putting Reddit under the same corporate master as Wired.com. Reddit, with a staff of about 10 now, has seen an extraordinary rise in traffic -- quadrupling page views since January 2010.

Reddit got a traffic spike of about 30% in traffic in August/September, due to an influx of Digg users responding to the the spectacular failure of Digg's redesign, according to Reddit engineer Jeremy Edberg. But much of the growth must be attributed to Reddit's ability to retain a sense of belonging to a club, even as the site grows and grows.

WIRED: Reddit vs. Digg rivalry by the numbers

While the front page is still the most popular part of the site, Reddit also has a wide collection of "sub-reddits" dedicated to particular topics and communities, including the not-to-be missed IAMA.

That stands for I Am A, and is a section of the site where people who are something -- from a Comcast technician to an Egyptian arrested in the anti-government protest -- offer to answer questions from curious users.

Reddit announced the milestone to its loyal and demanding userbase on Wednesday in a blog post by engineer Mike Schiraldi:

"There are only about 100 sites on the entire Internet that get a billion pageviews in a single month, and now Reddit can put on its smoking jacket and join that exclusive club.

"The New York Times isn't on the membership list, nor is Expedia, Weather.com, about.com, or Fox News. In your face, meteorologists!

"This is an accomplishment that all Redditors should take pride in, because people wouldn't keep arriving in droves -- and coming back -- if not for the community that you've created here."

As a side note, I first wrote about Reddit when they were just finished with Y-Combinator's summer mentorships, and Ohanian was very excited to tell me the site had more than 600 users.

It's safe to say the site now has plenty more than that, even as Ohanian and Huffman, along with the site's first employee Chris Slowe are now huddled together working on Hipmunk, a airline ticket search site.

Reddit remains in capable hands, and the numerically-limited staff has done amazing work with limited resources scaling the site, even when this reporter, who sits about 15 yards away from their office, shoots foam-tipped darts at their glass door for fun.