Reddit to power Wired’s long tail?

Posted by Martin Stabe on 1 November 2006 at 15:18
Tags: Digg, Journalism, Reddit, Wired

So Condé Nast’s Wired Digital has purchased the social news recommendation site Reddit.

Reddit is a tool much like Digg, but far smaller. According to GigaOm, the site has 100,000 members more than 1 million unique visitors last month.

The deal certainly makes sense from the point of view of a rapidly-growing four-person startup’s point of view. But some have been puzzled why the Condé Nast would want to bring something like this into the same stable as Vogue and GQ.

Robin Hamman, for example, notes that unlike Digg’s reported suitor News Corp, which might have some use for applying recommendation technology to its existing online publications, Condé Nast has few obvious uses for a social recommendation engine:

… Conde Nast titles don’t deal with the type of content that would find it’s way into Reddit, at least not at with Reddit’s existing userbase and implimentation.” Ok, so Wired might make good use of it, but how many readers of Details, House and Garden, or Bride are really going to want to recommend an article and/or vote it up or down the list of stories? It’s not the type of content that gets the blood stirring.

But Wired may be enough. The acquisition makes perfect sense when seen in the light of the pet theory of editor-in-chief Chris Anderson.

Recommendation tools like Reddit have an important place in Anderson’s theory of “long tail” digital economics. Merely making more niche products or information online is not suffient for the emergence of a “long tail” economy, according to Anderson. To become economically viable, technological systems need to be in place to connect niche supply and niche emand. ”Filters” are necessary to help people find obsure items of interest and “drive demand down the long tail”.

These online filters generally use some sort of mechanism to harness the wisdom of crowds” effect to help their users find material that is relevant to them. Search engines are the classic example, of course, but so are social recommendation sites like Digg, del.icio.us — and Reddit.

On his blog, Anderson writes of the acquisition: “Reddit is an evolution of the ‘voting’ system pioneered by Digg: it’s fast, clean and very scaleable to niche subject areas (read: Long Tail media).”

Others have already used Reddit’s technology to good effect. It will be very interesting to see what Wired does to put its editor’s theory into practice.
Anthony Mayfield has some thoughts on the acquisition, as well.

Tags: Digg, Journalism, Reddit, Wired