Salon & Reddit--A Love Story

Just days after Reddit's wildly successful IPO, I was drawn back to the days in 2017 when I was the CEO of Salon looking for a new platform to distribute content. Like many other publishers, Salon was overly dependent on Facebook to gather eyeballs as it accounted for ~30% of the site's traffic. However, after the 2016 U.S. Presidential election when everything got turned upside down in digital media, Facebook changed its algorithm, and Salon, like many others, saw traffic from there dwindle to nearly nothing.

When we were desperately scouring the digital landscape for new platforms to make up for the lost readership, I had known vaguely of Reddit but didn't understand enough about it. I knew it was raw and weird, but it was also highly engaging and could be one of those sneaky good opportunities that don't come around often. I cold-called out to their partnership team through a LinkedIn connection and they responded right away, happy to hear from us as we had a kinship as digital natives. I wasn't sure what to expect, but the more they explained what works on Reddit, the more convinced I was that we could be a meaningful part of their ecosystem. Then they said something that completely hooked me. We couldn't just put our content on their site and expect people to read and engage with it, but rather we had to work for and earn the community's trust.

We were small and underfinanced compared to the New York Times, Washington Post, and others, but we were scrappy, knew the essence of community, and had a single unfair advantage--a teammate named Mary Elizabeth Williams. If there was ever an Internet Hall of Fame, she would get my vote as an inductee. She started in the 1.0 era (like me) when the Internet was all about sharing links and building communities. She is a brilliant writer, thinker, and fantastic Salon Talks host to boot. We put her in charge of the Reddit relationship and our overall community strategy and while it took a little time, our traffic steadily grew alongside Reddit's exponential growth. As a result, Salon became profitable, became an attractive asset, and was acquired by a couple of ad tech whiz kids. It was recently sold again to a larger group and continues to thrive.

I'm many years removed from my tenure at Salon, but recently looked at Salon's traffic on SimilarWeb out of curiosity, and look what I found...

A match made in Internet heaven! Congratulations to Reddit and thank you for being a great partner to Salon.