Reddit, the popular internet hangout and community, is being spun out from parent company Condé Nast after five years due to technical issues caused by the site’s rapid rise in traffic numbers and a culture clash with the magazine publisher. Reddit will now be directly owned by Condé Nast’s parent company, Advance Publications.
In a blog post entitled Independence, Reddit general manager Erik Martin noted the reasons for the change, saying:
When reddit was acquired in October 2006 by Condé Nast, it was receiving about 700k page views per day. Now, reddit routinely gets that much traffic in 15 minutes. This explosion in traffic created technical, cultural, and organizational growing pains.
Reddit should now get more operational freedom as it reports to a board directly, rather than sitting as a division of Condé Nast. This should mean that they can let the community thrive over the next few years and “positively impact journalism, civic engagement, fundraising, product development, and learning” said Martin. They have also started the search for a new CEO in the San Francisco Bay area to compliment its eight people already in its offices there, the two in New York, and the lone sole in LA.