What's this? This is an unbiased just-the-facts news timeline ('newsline') about Reddit, created by Newslines contributors. Become a contributor

Reddit

Reddit62 posts

Reddit is a social news site started by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in 2005. The company was one of the first companies to Y Combinator’s business accelerator.

Biography view > Click for Latest News view
Jun 2005

Founded, funded by Y Combinator

0 Comments

Reddit is founded by Huffman and Ohanian both 22-year-old graduates of the University of Virginia. In first year they had rooms across the hall from each other, and became friends through video games.

Huffman wanted to make a phone system to order subs while he was pumping gas at a local gas stand. Ohanian calls a lawyer and they formed a company called RedBrick Solutions, because Charlottesville is full of red brick buildings. In the spring of their senior year they go to Boston to see a presentation by Graham at Harvard called “How to start a start-up”. They were able to get Graham to meet them for drinks at a local bar where they pitched their phone idea. A few days later, Graham tells them to apply for his new investment fund, Y Combinator. The students travel to Boston to pitch, but are rejected. On the way back to Charlottesville Graham calls them to say he wants them to come up with another idea — a web app. They decide to match the mechanism of Delicious with the content of Slashdot to build “the front page to the web”.

Y Combinator gives them $12,000 and they move to Boston in early June, 2005. After a few weeks the site is not ready when Graham links to it from an essay, giving it site 1000 hits. Reddit was the first Y Combinator launch, taking a total of $100,000. To make the site appear popular they populate it with fake posts.

2005

Christopher Slowe joins

0 Comments

Team-redditChristopher Slowe joins

2006

Swartz merges Infogami with Reddit

0 Comments

Aaron Swartz merges Infogami with Reddit where he joins Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian. The four Reddit staff work out of a small 3-bedroom apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts.

31 Oct, 2006

Reddit bought by Condé Nast

Acquisition0 Comments

Condé Nast Publications acquires Reddit for a reported $20 million. All four Reddit employees relocate from Boston to Wired’s San Francisco office and become part of Wired Digital, which the company bought three months previously. Conde Naste:

Our goal will be to build Reddit as an independent company by collaborating with Wired through the integration of its core technology, and by offering partnerships to allow other companies to do the same.

At this time the site has 70,000 daily unique visitors and approximately 700,000 or so page views.

Indicates $10M-$20M price range for Reddit

0 Comments

Ohanian keeps the exact amount a secret, but appears to confirm the price range.

People ask how much it was for, but I haven’t even told my girlfriend. I tell her, ‘You can Google it, and you’ll find it was between $10 million and $20 million.’

23 Feb, 2009

Imgur launch

Product Release0 Comments

Reddit user MrGrim creates Imgur, an image hosting service. The user describes it as his gift to Reddit:

I got fed up with all the other image hosts out there so I made my own. It doesn’t force you to compress your images, and it has neat things like crop, resize, rotate, and compression from 10-100. It’s my gift to you. Let’s not see anymore imageshack/photobucket around here 😉 I’ll be listening if anyone has some suggestions.

4 Jun, 2009

Mixergy interview

Interview0 Comments

Ohanian talks about how Y Combinator helped shape the idea for Reddit in the early stages:

We approached Y Combinator … with an idea that would transform the way you order food, specifically using a cell phone to do so.  They didn’t really like the idea.  They liked us, but they hated the idea.

They still didn’t have a firm idea, but sat down with Graham and talked about a site that would filter the most interesting web content.

…it was in that conversation with Paul where we developed this idea for creating a way to find out what’s new online.

The idea morphed into the final product:

All the actual mechanics of how that would work, basically happened in the next few weeks, while Steve [Huffman] and I were in a crap apartment, in Bedford, Massachusetts, playing a lot of Warcraft.

2010

YC Founders at Work: Reddit

Interview0 Comments

Livingston interviews Ohanian about the early days of Reddit. Livingston asks about the “Chicken and egg” problem of building a community with no initial users:

This is one that I have no hesitation in saying, but it always stirs up a lot of controversy. Steve [Huffman] built a really simple system for admins, that is Steve and me, so that when we submitted a link also let us type in a user name. It let us easily and efficiently create lots of fake users. And we were able to browbeat a few of our friends to build up comments. But the rest of our friends and family could not be begged or bribed enough to do it really consistently. The only option we had to resort to was to fake it. But we didn’t have to do it for too long because Paul [Graham] did us a big favor  by [profiling us] us in an early essay.

It was at some point about three or four weeks into it that neither Steve or I had to submit or vote on anything, and the site just worked…We could spend the day just lurking on Reddit, that is just using it like the vast majority of people do and not actually generate content. That was huge. That was when we realized, maybe we haven’t wasted this summer and we had a legitimate community.

17 Aug, 2010

Huffman leaves to start Hipmunk

0 Comments

Huffman leaves Reddit to start Hipmunk with Goldstein. Hipmunk is a travel search site that helps people book flights easily by presenting flight results in a visual timeline that allows people to select the best flight for them at a glance. The site is funded by Y Combinator.

Dec 2010

Christian vs Atheist fundraising challenge

0 Comments

Members of the Christianity subreddit hold a fundraiser for Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). Members of the atheism subreddit decide to hold an alternative fundraiser for World Vision’s Clean Water Fund. Later, the Islam subreddit joins, raising money for Islamic Relief. In less than a week, $200,000 is raised, mostly by the atheism subreddit, though the Christianity subreddit has a higher donation amount per subscriber.

6 Jan, 2011

Swartz arrested at MIT

Arrest0 Comments

After investigators at MIT began to suspect that someone is illegally downloading material from the JSTOR archive they trace the leak to a basement wiring closet where they find a laptop and external hard drive hooked up directly to a network. The laptop and the hard drive are hidden from view by a cardboard box. Secret Service Agent Michael places a surveillance camera in the closet. The surveillance images show Swartz entering the closet three days in a row. Using his white bicylce helmet as a mask, Swartz attempts to cover his face from the cameras as he tries to retrieve the computer equipment that he left their weeks before. On January 6th an officer sees Swartz attempt to leave MIT property with the laptop and hard drive. At 2:11 p.m. Swartz is ID’d on a bicycle on Massachusetts Avenue by an MIT police officer, according to his own report. That report states that when he encounters Captain Albert Pierce of the MIT Police Department, Swartz jumps off his bike and runs down Lee Street. He runs approximately 400 feet before being handcuffed and charged with breaking and entering.

22 Mar, 2011

Condé Nast to spin-off Reddit for $200m

0 Comments

According to Peter Kafka of All Things D, Condé Nast wants to spin-off Reddit for $200 million. The theory is that taking Reddit outside of Condé Nast’s corporate structure would make the site that much more valuable, and would give it a better chance to compete for capital, managers and employees alongside the likes of startups like Quora, StackExchange, and others.

28 Apr, 2011

Reddit eclipses Digg

0 Comments

For the first time Alexa shows Digg’s reach being eclipsed by Reddit. According to the online ranking service, Reddit is now the 117th most popular site on the web, while Digg has fallen to 138th.

6 Sep, 2011

Splits from Condé Nast

0 Comments

Reddit splits from Condé Nast, and now operates as a subsidiary of Condé Nast’s parent company, Advance Publications. Ohanian return to the board. At this time the site serves 1.5 billion page views per month.

30 May, 2012

Inc. interview

Interview0 Comments

Ohanian tells the magazine about his conversation with Graham after Y Combinator rejected his initial pitch:

The next morning, on the train back to Virginia, hung over, somewhere in the middle of Connecticut, I get a call from Paul. He says, “I’m sorry, we made a mistake. We don’t like your idea, but we like you guys.” We got off the train, and I was able to sweet-talk the Amtrak lady into not charging us to turn around. In our conversation, Paul said, “You guys need to build the front page of the Internet.” That was all Paul, and that became Reddit. We built Reddit in three weeks.

The buyout also happened partly by chance:

The acquisition by Condé Nast basically started with a Halloween party, where we met a reporter who introduced me to a freelancer for Wired who told her boss about us. That editor’s husband was the biz-dev guy at Condé Nast. He worked on a licensing deal with us, and everything worked great. So we started talking money. Founders are supposed to be not at all interested in selling. But there is a price at which a founder can’t help being interested.

19 Jun, 2012

Site built with hundreds of fake accounts

0 Comments

In a video for Udacity, Huffman and Ohanian reveal that they used fake accounts to populate the site in its earliest days. Huffman:

You would go to Reddit in the early days, the first couple of months and there’d be tons of… fake users

Through those fake accounts, Huffman and Ohanian submitted high-quality content — the type of articles they wanted to read. This “set the tone” for the site as whole, Huffman says and, at the same time, made it look populated.

26 Jun, 2012

Make Something People Love

0 Comments

ohanianebookOhanian publishes an Ebook which includes his thoughts on the growth of Reddit and Hipmunk:

And this marvelous community of communities owes its existence to a massive advertising budget of…$500. To date that is the sum total of money that has been spent advertising reddit. Five hundred dollars, and every dollar of it spent on stickers. Yes, stickers: the soundest investment I ever made. I used to travel around the country a lot (thank you, Chinatown bus), and everywhere I went I took stickers with me. I put them on signs, poles, and even other advertisements.

29 Aug, 2012

President Obama AMA

0 Comments

obama-amaPresident Obama participates in a surprise open question-and-answer session on the Web community Reddit, as the subject of one of the site’s regular “Ask Me Anything” threads. Reddit’s site experienced some outages immediately following the announcement, due to increased traffic.

19 Sep, 2012

May be worth $240M

0 Comments

Forbes reports that the company has updated its incorporation papers in Delaware. Advance has recapitalized Reddit, taking it out of the Conde Nast division, and allowing Reddit employees to own a sizable minority of newly issued stock. Advance bought $20 million in stock as part of the recapitalization and put in provisions saying that if the company is sold for less than $240 million, the conversion terms will change and Advance will get a bigger piece. It says this implies Reddit is on track to be worth at least $240 million.