Condé Nast spins off Reddit. “Nothing is off-limits,” says co-founder

Publishing corporation Condé Nast has spun off news aggregator Reddit.com into a fully-owned subsidiary that will operate autonomously from the company, the site announced today.

Reddit is still owned by Advanced Publishing, which owns Condé Nast, but Advance will not be directly involved with day-to-day activities as Condé Nast was, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian told VentureBeat. Condé Nast will also make an investment in Reddit, he said. Ohanian will now serve as a member of the board of directors of Reddit Inc., the new company.

“Reddit is a top-50 website, all the peers in that space operate as autonomous companies,” Ohanian told VentureBeat. “Condé Nast felt like it was not adding enough value to let Reddit achieve its full potential.”

The site makes money off advertisements and a premium subscription, called Reddit Gold, that grants its users additional features for a monthly fee. That business model will live on, but the company also plans to introduce some new projects that should generate additional revenue without getting in the way of the user experience, Ohanian said.

“We’ll hopefully deploy a couple of other fun things that most importantly don’t sacrifice the user experience,” he said. “That’s the kind of thing I’m always going to push for.”

Reddit had around 700,000 page views per day when it was first acquired, but it has since grown to more than a billion page views monthly. As part of the company’s new autonomy, it has started searching for a chief executive officer to run the company. There’s also a chance the company will now work on official mobile applications and other types of ways to view the site.

“Nothing is off-limits,” Ohanian said. “If it helps the user experience and helps spread Reddit, it’s fair game.”