The next shoe drops

Chris Anderson
The Long Tail

October 31, 2006

After we bought back [ http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2006/07/and_to_cap_off_.html ] our website in July, I promised that more was to come. Today I'm delighted to share another bit of good news: we've just acquired Reddit [ http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/10/31/breaking-news-conde-nastwired-acquires-reddit/ ]. 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).

To give you an example of how voting-based news sites can apply to news verticals, check out Lipstick.com, which applies the wisdom of crowds, if that's the term, to celebrity news. It's an experiment that we at Conde Nast and our online side, CondeNet, have been running on the Reddit platform for most of the year, and it's given us a lot of confidence in the technology.

Reddit's four employees--founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, along with Christopher Slowe and Aaron Swartz, who joined later--will move to our offices in San Francisco. Having had the chance to hang out with them in the run-up to this deal--they are every bit as smart and energetic as you'd guess from the site, and geeky enough to fit in perfectly here--I can't wait. Expect both their technology and ideas to show up in our own site relaunch early next year.