Three years ago, Conde Nast bought out Reddit. Reddit is a website where a community of users vote on the most interesting stories. The most interesting recent stories land on the Reddit homepage and receive a large number of visits. Conde Nast has been taking a hit lately as its been discovered that they may lose $1 billion in ad revenue this year.

Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian both founded Reddit after launching it from Y-Combinator. Christopher Rowe and Aaron Swartz joined the team shortly after the company was founded. Y-Combinator is an incubation firm started by Paul Graham. Both of the Reddit founders are leaving for personal reasons.

Huffman is moving back to Virginia to spend more time with his wife. Ohanian plans to spend some time traveling. Rowe will be staying with Reddit for a while. Swartz was fired from Reddit two years ago for not respecting the company rules after being acquired by Wired Magazine.

Reddit, the social bookmarking website that was acquired by Condé Nast in November 2006  has opened up their source code.  The source code is available at http://code.reddit.com. 

The success of Digg and Reddit have inspired many companies to start their own social bookmarking sites.  Netscape started and closed down Propeller and Mixx has risen as a favorite.   Del.icio.us was acquired by Yahoo! and StumbleUpon was acquired by eBay.  MySpace, Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, and Live also have social bookmarking features.  Digg still remains as Reddit’s biggest competitor.  Going open source is one way that Reddit has one-upped Digg.

Ever since Reddit was acquired by Condé Nast, the company’s monthly uniques has grown by 4.4 million and page views have grown by 120 million according to co-founder Steve Huffman.  Reddit will be launching a new design and a partnership with PBS shortly.

Reddit is a product of Y-Combinator.

The digital entity of Wired Magazine, Wired.com has acquired Ars Technica.  Ars Technica is a technology blog that was started in 1998 by Ken “Caesar” Fisher.  Ars Technica has 3 operating revenue sources: affiliate sales commissions, advertising through Federated Media, user subscription fees, and sales of Ars brand merchandise.

Ars Technica focuses on topics such as Technology and Culture, CPU Theory & Praxis, Hardware, Infinite Loop (about Apple), One Microsoft Way (about Microsoft), Open Ended (open source software), Kit (hardware), Nobel Intent (science), and Opposable Thumbs (video games).

The financial details were undisclosed, but TechCrunch speculates that the amount was around the range of $25 million in cash.  Ars Technica receives about 1.5 million monthly unique visitors and 4 million page views. 

CondéNet will take over the advertising sales for Ars Technica.  Ars Technica will be rolled into Wired.

Condé Nast’s Flip.com is a social network for young teenager with features that include Flipbooks, Member channels like (writing/poetry, friends/family, movies/tv, art/photography, opinions/rants, pets/animals, etc.).  Rather than closing down the social network completely and rebuilding from the ground up, Flip will take widgets and embed them into other social networks for the purpose of building their own user-base.  Interesting move.

Flip.com supposedly has about 300,000 users.  The company started almost a year ago with the goal of making a place for teenage girls to showcase their hobbies.  Flip recently debuted as a Facebook application and according to TechCrunch, there are only 9 active users on that application as of right now. 

“Flip’s demographic is perfectly aligned with Facebook.  We’ve made 300,000 girls incredibly happy, but there’s millions of them on Facebook. And we know they’re interested the same kinds of tools that are available there. It would be a whole lot harder to build from 300,000 to the serious numbers like 1 or 2 million, which is the sweet spot for us. So this seemed like the best way to go,” stated Sarah Chubb, President of CondéNet [Source: paidContent].

About a year ago, Flip hired Jane Grenier, a former Associate Publisher of Marketing for Teen Vogue to engage marketers into the site.  Condé Nast is the parent company of The New Yorker, Wired Magazine, GQ, Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Portfolio.com.

What has the alien done for its users lately? The users aren’t happy, that’s for sure. One of the stories that made it on the homepage today is:

Reddit has been taken over by US politics ^[1] and was posted by _simon_^[2], which was submitted roughly 8 hours ago.

I have Reddit plugged into my RSS feed aggregation homepage and I definitely agree. Whenever I check out the homepage RSS feeds, the stories mostly pertain to what is happening in the lives of George Bush and Dick Cheney. While this is very important to the nation and to us as a whole, it would be nice to see some news diversification. Diversification is one of Digg’s strengths, despite the fact that Google/Apple news tend to dominate the various technology industry homepages.

Further evidence that indicates the unhappiness of Reddit users include a story that was homepaged earlier today:
Should reddit go open source so that features get implemented^[3] and was submitted by Dreyus^[4]

Reading the commentary in both submitted articles is interesting. There seems to be an intense discussion in the open source posting between Reddit developers and users. Below is a screen shot example:

While I do not know much about the evolution of Reddit from history to acquisition to its present state so I may be jumping the gun in pointing out the opinion of Reddit users, I definitely think that reading the comments from the users is an indication of what has been happening since the acquisition of Reddit by Condé Nast^[5].

[1] Reddit news posting
[2] Reddit user: _simon_
[3] Reddit news posting
[4] Reddit user: Dreyfu
[5] TechCrunch: Breaking News: Condé Nast/Wired Acquires Reddit

Condé Nast Publications is the owner of Vogue, style.com, GQ, Wired, Golf Digest, The New Yorker and Reddit. Now Condé Nast is launching a new website called Portfolio.com. There will also be a magazine launching on Monday. The website is currently in Beta.

However, it seems like the publication aims to be a direct competitor of The New York Times based on the topics that are being covered: News & Markets, Views, Executives, Resources, Careers, Business Travel, and Culture & Lifestyle.

The website is expected to be fully prepared by Monday.