By Reddit has almost always been a laid back link sharing and discussion forum for the masses. So much so they call themselves the Frontpage of the Internet. Now, it would seem with Steve Huffman, co-founder of the site, at the helm as CEO Reddit is taking advertising and content a lot more seriously. As a beta tester I get access to new features on the site, some which never make it past beta. One of those new features is a fundamental shift in how Reddit treats it’s traffic, they call it “Media Previews”.
While clicking on a link listed on the site will still take you to the linked web page, going to the comment will display the content embedded as well as the comments. For UGC sites that made their revenue from Reddit traffic, this could be a big change.
Currently I’ve seen this feature embed gifs from Gfycat, Photos on Imgur.com, and videos from YouTube. The feature also appears to apply to SoundCloud, Vimeo, Twitter, and any direct image link such as .jpg, .gif, and .png. Out of the sites included YouTube stands to be the most impacted. Imgur and Gyfcat have always allowed Redditors to link directly to an image without loading their landing page with ads, but YouTube never has. with video embeds on the site Reddit could retain more traffic and increase time spent on the site, probably not healthy for some users, which could translate into higher revenues – especially since they’ve been making updates to their self-serve advertising system to be more attractive to smaller budget advertisers.
This could also spell doom for a small website or blog that has a great image linked from Reddit. If tens of thousands of people start loading an image just to discuss in the comments section it could overload a website on a shared server or VPS easily or greatly increase the cost of hosting for that company.
Remember this is just a Beta feature and may not go live. Users can also turn off this feature if they want to, and some beta testers have complained about this on mobile devices. I’ll update this post if and when a final disposition is announced.
You can read more about this on the Beta testers sub-reddit here: https://www.reddit.com/r/beta/comments/46ax3q/beta_update_20160217_media_previews/