With 3.8B monthly page views, Reddit revitalizes its Gold subscriptions to pay the bills

Community news sharing site Reddit released some impressive new traffic statistics today that confirm the site is continuing its trend of crazy upward growth.

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The site brought in over 3.8 billion page views and more than 46 million unique visitors in October, Reddit CEO Yishan Wong wrote in a company blog post today. That’s double the number of page views the site was pulling in during the same month last year.

But all that growth also brings higher operating costs — such as servers to handle the increased traffic, hiring new engineers, and more — which it plans to pay for by revitalizing its voluntary Reddit Gold paid subscriptions.

“We have a choice to make: We can start running a bunch more ads, or we can give you, the community, more reasons to support the site with your own money through Reddit gold,” Yishan wrote. “Advertising will probably always be a part of our revenue, but we want to be ultimately beholden to you, the users.”

Users can pay a $3.99 monthly fee for Reddit Gold or opt for a $29.99 annual fee. Additionally, users can buy their friends a month of the service. The optional subscription gives users access to a handful of perks, like loading more comments automatically on a page, seeing new comments highlighted upon returning to a page, the ability to turn off display ads, and more. Additionally, the company is adding a few more perks, like saving comments and filtering saved submissions by subreddit (aka sub categories within Reddit). Some of the perks will end up rolling out to all users, but Gold subscribers get first access.

Yishan also said the company is exploring more ways to add value to Gold subscriptions, such as working with retailers to bring exclusive deals to Gold subscribers. If this does pan out, it could provide Reddit with another source of revenue (depending on the deal), without having to worry about pissing off its hardcore users with lots of ads and promotional marketing.