Reddit in 2013: 56B pageviews, 41M posts, 405M comments, and oh-so-many cats

Reddit released its stats for 2013, revealing some staggering new numbers about visitors and page views, votes and comments, and the top posts of the year. 

The self-proclaimed “front page of the Internet” attracted 56 billion pageviews and 731 million unique visitors in 2013, with an average visit duration of 15 minutes, 55 seconds. This compares to 37 billion page views and 400 million unique visitors in 2012.

Reddit is an online community where people submit links or discussion threads on pretty much anything to specific categories, called subreddits. The site aggregates the most popular submissions by votes, comments, pageviews, and more to a front page.

Reddit saw a total of 40,855,032 posts this year, with 404,603,286 comments, 3,676,091,578 comment votes, 3,037,413,635 link votes, and 6.7 billion votes in total.

These are serious numbers.

Content ranges widely on Reddit, including intense discussions on the origins of the universe, heated political debates, crazy food ideas, and silly cat photos. So many cat photos.

The top Reddit post of the year was an “AskReddit” question about “what gif reduces you to hysterical laughter every time,” with 3,609 689 million page views. The most popular submissions (unsurprisingly) involve boys and pets doing silly things.

The third most popular post was also an “AskReddit” post regarding funny pictures, where again, cats and boys doing silly things maintain the throne.

Four of the 10 most viewed posts related to the Boston Marathon bombing, when a cabal of Redditers compiled information into several minute-by-minute updates about the situation. Despite supposedly noble intentions, some of the comment threads spawned theories about who the bombers were and how to deal with them. This, in turn, led to Reddit issuing an apology for fueling “online witch hunts and dangerous speculation.”

Fourth place in the pageview rankings went to Bill Gates for his “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) session, where anyone on Reddit can post a question that the AMA participant answers in specific window of time. Gates attracted just over 3 million page views. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s AMA ranked seventh. 

Reddit also gave out awards for the best subreddits of 2013, which included “books,” “data is beautiful,” “change my view,” and “DIY.”

The United States tops the list for most monthly unique visitors, with 48,533,932 million. However, the Pew Center came out with a study earlier this year which found that only 6 percent of online American adults visit Reddit. In fact, Canada has a greater percentage of unique visitors relative to its population.

The United Kingdom, Australia, and Germany follow the U.S. and Canada for most monthly uniques. Luxembourg has the longest average visit duration of 32 minutes, followed by Niger, Slovenia, and Hungary.

What will 2014 bring? My money is on more cat photos.