Reddit comes up in the news a lot these days. Ellen Pao, the company's former interim CEO, faced off against Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in a highly publicized trial on gender discrimination. And Reddit itself often becomes news, too, like when the site's moderators challenged the company's decisions, or when its cofounder—now new CEO—Steve Huffman stepped in to curb harassment on the site. And since WIRED reports on Reddit, we want to clear something up: we aren't related to the site.
WIRED's parent company, Condé Nast, does not own Reddit, and we at WIRED have no direct relationship with Reddit. Condé Nast’s parent company, Advance Publications, is Reddit's majority shareholder, but Advance's financial stake has no influence over the editorial decisions WIRED makes in how we cover Reddit.
It's understandable that readers would have questions and maybe feel a little confused on these points. Condé Nast's history with Reddit is complicated, and Reddit's office was once joined right here in San Francisco to our own. Here's a brief history of the connections among the various companies and where they stand now.
Founded in 2005, Reddit quickly grew into a massively popular online community. In 2006, Condé Nast expressed an interest in acquiring the site, which already was seeing around 700,000 page views per day. That same year, Condé Nast acquired WIRED.com from Lycos, uniting the print and digital publications under a single owner.
Beginning in the fall of 2006, Reddit became a subsidiary of Condé Nast, just like WIRED and magazines such as Vogue and The New Yorker. Reddit has since called Condé's ownership period "a rare instance of corporate benevolence/indifference."
During this time, Reddit's office was on the same floor as the WIRED office in San Francisco. Reddit employees had to walk through WIRED.com's office to reach their own, and they dined alongside WIRED's staff in the lunchroom. "Everybody’s always coming into our room to hang out and chat or invite us to play the new video game system that WIRED is testing," Reddit cofounder Aaron Swartz said of the shared space in a November 2006 blog post.
The relationship shifted in 2011 when Condé Nast spun off Reddit into a separate company ("reddit inc."). "This change is all about setting up Reddit so that it can better handle future growth and opportunities,” Reddit said in a blog post at the time, adding that the site’s explosion of traffic "created technical, cultural, and organizational growing pains." However, according to Reddit, Condé Nast's parent company, Advance Publications, remained the sole shareholder of Reddit at the time, and its board was all Advance employees.
In 2012, Reddit become truly a private, independent company after receiving outside investment. “We've established a new board,” then-CEO Yishan Wong wrote, “and a revamped capital structure that will allow Reddit to manage its own finances and operations.”
To this day, Advance Publications remains a majority shareholder of Reddit, but Reddit says it is fully independent. “Today, they’re like any other helpful investor,” Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, now a board member, told WIRED in an email. Some of Reddit’s other investors include Y Combinator’s Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel, Snoop Dogg, and Jared Leto.
Last year, Reddit moved out of WIRED's office. We read Reddit, we report on Reddit, and we see our stories posted there. We cover Reddit like we do any other tech company. And we plan to keep it that way.
