2 Billion & Beyond

2 Billion & Beyond:

In December 2011, reddit served 2.07 billion pageviews. Crazy. Here are some details:

1. 2,065,237,338 pageviews
2. 34,879,881 unique visitors
3. 12.97 pages / visit
4. 16 minutes average time on site
5. Over 100 million monthly pageviews per employee

And, more importantly, our community stats:

1. 100,000+ subreddits
2. 8,400+ subreddits with over 100 subscribers

In less than a year, reddit traffic has more than doubled. How did this happen? Well, let’s take a look at the past year. Thanks to our outstanding moderators and subscribers, reddit is now home to an active subreddit for almost every city, university, tv show, video game, sports team, image-fetish, flavor of politics, and even every world's problems. We even have vibrant meta subreddits, which reflect reddit through satire and introspection. Subreddits like SOPA, Skyrim, ELI5, RomeSweetRome, OccupyWallStreet, RandomKindness, ShutUpAndTakeMyMoney,ProjectEnrichment, RedditThroughHistory, LoseIt, and DarkNetPlan can go from zero to one of the top hundred subreddits in months. Thanks to you, fundraising, grassroots movements, and political action on reddit have a massive impact.

Here’s a list of things we don’t (and won’t) do for traffic:

1. We don't get traffic through ads.
2. We don’t participate in any traffic trading.
3. We don’t email our users (unless they choose to enter an email and then forget their password).
4. We don’t harass users to sign up.
5. We don’t harass users to invite their friends.
6. We don’t pester you to download our app.
7. We don’t use slideshows and other pageview gimmicks.
8. We don't know anything about SEO.
9. We don't integrate with Facebook.
10. We don't even link to our Facebook or twitter accounts.

So how do we account for the growth? Like all things reddit, the credit goes to our community -- or rather, community of communities.

What's in store for 2012?

There are redditors who feel reddit is getting too big, and even if we don't always reach the same conclusions, we see the same trends and patterns you do. We have some improvements coming that will help redditors discover new subreddits, help new users better understand the way reddit works, and provide better tools to support the moderators of both big and small subreddits. We're also going to keep improving the infrastructure so that the site will be faster and more stable even as growth continues.

However, the organic events and new subreddits that people are going to be talking about in 2012 -- those will come from you. We're excited to see what you come up with, and it's a sublime feeling to look at 2012, or next month, or the next day and be able to honestly say "we have no idea what's going to happen next."

The other admins and I were all addicted cult members redditors before we worked here. We're all here because we believe that in spite (or perhaps because of) all the imperfections and chaos, reddit matters. Thank you for all your creativity, hard work, criticisms, and ideas. Thank you for getting us this far.

Nerd Stuff

Windows still leads the pack for top OS, however the mobile market is eating away at all three of the traditional models this past year. With browsers, Chrome is in front, and thanks to its auto-updating, is the most up-to-date browser. Most Firefox traffic still comes from the 3.x versions. An astonishing 4 million of our visitors are using some archaic form of IE. Finally, the US still dominates in traffic, however Canada and Europe are become a growing force, despite alienth’s and rram’s attempts to run late night maintenances (and Australia’s exorbitantly expensive bananas).

For the year of 2011:

Windows	68%
Mac	20%
Linux	4%
Android	3%
iPhone	2%

Chrome	42%
Firefox	34%
Safari	12%
IE (5% of IE traffic still on IE 6 ಠ_ಠ)	7%
Opera	2%

United States	65%
Canada  America’s Hat	10%
United Kingdom	6%
Aussies	3%
Germany	1.5%