Reddit, the self-styled “front page of the internet”, is moving to position itself as a new digital distribution point for publishers.
Historically, the 13-year-old internet community has been a fairly hostile environment for publishers, due to staunch rules against self-promotion and commercialisation.
If you’ve ever seen a presentation by a Facebook exec, you’ll know that they hold up The Guardian as the poster child for building an audience using a timeline app.
After launching its social reader last September The Guardian reported 4m installs in just two months, and in March it predicted that social traffic would soon become more important than search.
Then last month Facebook director of platform partnerships Christian Hernandez said that the app has 5.7m active monthly users and had been essential for allowing the newspaper to “close the viral loop”.
A couple of months ago, Tanya Cordrey, the director of digital development for the Guardian, made a statement that raised some eyebrows. “It’s only a matter of time until social overtakes search for the Guardian,” she told attendees at the Guardian Changing Media Submit.
The impetus for that comment was the Guardian’s Facebook app, which enables Facebook users to share the articles they read on guardian.co.uk with their Facebook friends.
Yesterday, we attended the Amazon Web Services Summit in New York where Dr Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon, gave the keynote speech highlighting how cloud services will transform how we do business.
Though some critics think cloud services may have unforeseen challenges, Vogals somewhat salesy keynote also had representatives of companies using Amazon cloud services come to the stage to say why the cloud is enabling their businesses to do things they could never do before.
As these (and most) businesses are discovering, a data revolution is taking place. The amount of information we need to process, map and store is growing at exponential rates. So in comes cloud services.