"Reach" (impressions/eyeballs) are only important insofar as you're talking to someone who might buy what you're selling (see "relevancy"). The sub-reddit system could theoretically segment the audience in interesting ways, but other than r/gaming, there aren't many natural industry fits amongst popular sub-reddits.

Anecdotally, the audience would also seem to be advertisement-averse. An advertiser should be willing to pay network prices for the audience (i.e. pennies CPM), which makes it a nice living for a small group of folks living off their passion, but pretty useless to a Condé Nast trying to run a media empire.

I think the business model in a reddit-like site could be selling curated content in other media, e.g. a meme-series of coffee table books. Think Harry Potter, not Oprah.

If you're in the content game, your business's value is in having the attention of a group of people. Your first attempt to monetize that asset needn't be to sell your audience's attention to someone else, in this case undermining your ability to keep their attention. Instead, you should focus on bringing things your audience wants - and would pay for - to them. Sometimes that means you need to make the things they want to buy instead of shilling them for someone else, because no one sells what your people want.

Condé Nast isn't built to do this.

They need someone with deep, intimate knowledge of the community and the product. The best source for that in my opinion would be internal.

Reddit would be perfect for it, and for campuses with less generous email policies. It doesn't interfere with work communication and its better suited for the sort of discussions and arguments that email often plays host to.

As a student, I can't speak much for companies. And I'm aware of Reddit's recent College promotion and how easy it is to make, moderate, etc a new Reddit. But a dedicated Reddit integrated with college websites or email could be a profit stream.

FTFY: This change is all about setting up reddit so that it can be be sold.

1. paid mobile apps 2. paid API access 3. build an internal Flattr like service 4. offline events 5. go compete with Disqus

I would like to see reddit release a product where I, can implement a forum system much like reddit but completely autonomous and hosted on their own service - basically a replacement to the dreaded phpBB. Hell, I'd pay for it.

How much? I'd say 50M$ would be adequate.

I think an online service could revolutionise the way we all read and digest news, Reddit is the first stepping stone in this revolution but I expect it to be overtaken soon by a superior service (The same way Facebook has MySpace).