More acquisition news: Reddit, the Digg-style social bookmarking or social-news site, has been acquired by Conde Nast, the magazine publisher behind Wired, The New Yorker, Vogue, GQ and a bunch of other magazines. The announcement from the Reddit team — which includes just four people — is here. No word so far on whether the rumoured price of $65-million has any relationship to reality (I would be suprised if it was anything close to that).
Reddit is to become part of Wired media, and its voting-style service is expected to be incorporated into or Digg-ify some of Conde Nast’s other sites. As more than one observer has commented, it seems likely that the magazine empire got to know the guys at Reddit — including Alexis Ohanian, who I did a short email interview with last year — when they put together lipstick.com, a celebrity news site. They also did a similar kind of private label thing for Slate.
Maybe it’s just because I work for an old-fashioned media entity, but I happen to think that the kind of thing Digg and Reddit and Netscape.com are doing makes a lot of sense as part of a media property of some kind. The interesting thing to watch will be whether the magazine sites that Conde Nast tries to Digg-ify will be restricted to content from those magazines, or whether they will open them up.
In any case, congrats to Alexis and his team (who got their start working in someone’s apartment as part of Paul Graham’s Y Combinator, a kind of summer camp for startups). I hope the deal works out for them. Matt Sparkes has an email interview with Alexis here.
