Now they're chumps for not putting a grown up in charge of converting 280 million page views/month and a dedicated community to enough money to support 4 engineers and a bunch of servers.
The comparison to Gruber etc is misleading, since Gruber never got bought by a major company. This is more like 30 Rock asking you to donate to NBC.
That's not how it happened.
> Now they're chumps for not putting a grown up in charge
I like to think of myself as a grown up.
> converting 280 million page views/month and a dedicated community to enough money to support 4 engineers and a bunch of servers.
This is the crux of the problem. Marketing and ad sales is out of our direct control and has been lacking, so we've had to resort to other options. Self serve advertising last year was one of them, and it has done us well. This is more extreme for sure, but our plan is to eventually go towards the optional subscription model (like Ars Technica or Fark).
Granted, you know better than me.
>I like to think of myself as a grown up
By "grown up" I just mean someone experienced with running the business side. I wouldn't call myself "a grown up" either in that sense, having never done that.
> Marketing and ad sales is out of our direct control and has been lacking
Sorry to hear that. Seems like a common story for startups. I think you guys could do well with a paid model like Metafilter's.
The people over at reddit have made two thing clear: that Conde Nast won't increase their budget unless they increase their revenue. And that their current budget is not enough for them to run reddit the way they would like.
I'm certainly not defending Conde Nast, nor will I blindly defend reddit. And I certainly don't expect any company to run a site the size of reddit out of charity.
I will donate, as I've been a long time reddit user who enjoys the site (though somewhat less as time goes on).