31 upvotes, 2 direct replies (showing 2)
View submission: Sunsetting Secret Santa and Reddit Gifts
Not everything a business does is directly profitable. Reddit makes money off of advertising traffic. Anything they do that improves user experience will, keep current users happy, increases their time spent on Reddit, and attracts new users. So if people really like the gift exchanges it would make Reddit more profitable, just maybe it doesn’t increase profits enough to make it worth the resources. I’m sure time will tell. Maybe enough people hate this so much they leave, or spend less time on Reddit that they lose money. Probably not, but who knows?
Comment by turtledragon27 at 09/06/2021 at 21:51 UTC
22 upvotes, 1 direct replies
When they changed ads to those bullshit 'promoted posts' I switched apps to a third party one that doesn't show ads. I also use adblocler on pc so they haven't received a dime of ad revenue from me since.
I'm sure there are many people pettier than me who would do the same thing because of this announcement.
Comment by WoozleWuzzle at 10/06/2021 at 16:56 UTC*
2 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Could be RedditGifts was not gaining more participants and was slowly dying already. If it's not keeping users and causing resources to develop a dying part of the product why keep producing it?
Arbitrary day only seems to get around 10k people signing up. The other random ones are in the 300-1200 people range. Not exactly a ton of people are using the service.
How many resources did it cost to keep open? Could they just stop development and let it run indefinitely? I dunno.
Also the biggest one "Secret Santa" has had no real growth compared to the broader site. Even if they paired it down to just once a year to save resources would seem to be smart. Like April Fools. Not sure why they didn't at least do that to save face.
Here's the break down on sign ups for the yearly Secret Santa