An administrator at the popular social news site, Reddit, yesterday posted a thread titled 2010, we hardly knew ye which summarized the changes Reddit underwent last year. The biggest change of course was the phenomenal growth that the site experienced and continues to see. Monthly pageviews more than tripled from the beginning of 2010 to its end.
Here are the changes that were posted, by the numbers:
| Jan 2010 | Dec 2010 | |
|---|---|---|
| pageviews | 250 million | 829 million |
| average time per visit | 12m41s | 15m21s |
| bytes in | 2.8 trillion | 8.1 trillion |
| bytes out | 10.1 trillion | 44.4 trillion |
| number of servers | 50 | 119 |
| memory (ram) | 424 GB | 1214 GB |
| memory (disks) | 16 TB | 48 TB |
| engineers | 4 | 4 |
| search | sucked | works |
Nerd talk: Akamai hits aren’t included in the bandwidth totals.
We’re also really proud of some non-computer-related numbers:
Money raised for Haiti: $185,356.70
Money raised for DonorsChoose: $601,269 (time to undo another button, Stephen)
Signatures on the petition that got Cyanide & Happiness’s Dave into America: 150,000
Verified gifts received on Arbitrary Day: 2954
Verified secret santa gifts received: 13,000
Countries that have sent us a postcard:60edit:63 (don’t see your country? send us a postcard!)
Additionally, a chart was posted showing a more detailed picture of how long people stayed on the site.
A big reason for Reddit’s growth this year comes at the cost of Digg’s losses. Can anyone tell me when Digg v4 came out? Here’s a graph from Alexa showing pageviews for Reddit (blue) and Digg (red). I think you can see the answer.
It will be interesting to see how Reddit sustains this growth. Seeing the infrastructure grow with the page views is reassuring that the site will be able to sustain more users signing up and becoming regular visitors. Of course, as I write this article, Reddit is being slow to load pages and I’m occasionally receiving errors “under heavy load”.
2011 will indeed be a fascinating time to see how it all pans out.