Ever need to stay motivated on your path to business success? Sometimes it helps to know that not every start-up begins in an office, or there can be a hitch or two along the way.
Each month we’ll take a trip down memory lane to re-visit a business story.
This month: Reddit, launched June 2005
Reddit has long been the source of witty posts and pictures circulating the web. The entertainment social network that allows registered users to vote ‘up’ or ‘down’ the submission into their content areas has been wildly popular since its launch.
Started up by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in June 2005 from an apartment in Massachusettes, the news-aggregator now has more users than the population of France.
The site later went on to gain devoted ‘Redditors’ or users, who helped name a whale Mr.Splashy Pants as part of a Greenpeace awareness campaign in 2007. Reddit also hosted one of its largest ‘Ask Me Anything’ threads by hosting an Obama Q&A during his second presidential campaign and have been active in a number of political activations.
Ohanian was a vocal opponent of SOPA, (debate over freedom of the internet and privacy laws) telling Time in an interview:
“No one at the Reddit administrative team actually started that. Instead, in perfect Reddit form, the site’s team simply took notice of an escalating campaign of Redditors who promised to take themselves out of Redditland for the day. We were following the lead of the user base”
The site’s popularity was obvious not just to users, but to outside investment, with the social network being acquired by publishing giant Condé Nast in October 2006. The site later became a direct subsidiary of Advance Publications in September 2011.
Although Advance is still its largest shareholder, Reddit operated as an independent entity from its California base since August 2012.
