Biz & IT

A week of celeb nudes could pay for a month of reddit’s servers, says mod

r/TheFappening was shut down, but after it was allowed to linger and earn for a week.

Casey Johnston – Sep 10, 2014 3:00 pm | 137

Reddit took down the subreddit created to trade links to stolen nude photos of celebrities, but only after the traffic had crested. Credit: reddit.

After temporarily linking to recently leaked celebrity nude photos, reddit collected enough money in subscriptions to cover its server costs for nearly a month. The revelation comes via John Menese, a mod who ran the subreddit in question (r/TheFappening) and spoke with Wired about the experience.

reddit doesn’t disclose its server costs as a matter of course, and the company did not respond to a request for comment. Instead, the revenue calculation is based on an October 2013 post from CEO Yishan Wong stating that one month of a reddit gold subscription priced at $3.99 covers 4.6 hours of use for one server. Each subreddit displays how much server time is paid for by its reddit gold members, and Menese told Wired that r/TheFappening earned 27 days’ worth of server time before the forum was banned. (For the back of napkin math, 27 days multiplied by 24 hours is a total of 648 hours. Dividing 648 hours by 4.6 equals 140.9. And 140.9 subscriptions at $3.99 a piece would be $562 earned per server. reddit presumably has quite a few servers, and this take doesn’t include what the site would have also made from display and self-serve ads.)

The celeb photos originally surfaced on 4chan around August 31, reportedly obtained through a brute-force attack on iCloud account logins. The photos were hosted on various sites across the Internet, and r/TheFappening sprang up as a clearinghouse for links to the stolen photos. The subreddit was shut down on September 6, nearly a week after the photos originally started circulating.

reddit admins gave multiple reasons for its closure. First, Wong wrote in a blog post that the company was flooded with takedown notices despite only linking to content and not hosting it.

The CEO said that while reddit respects free speech, reddit users have a “responsibility” to be considerate in the content they post, consume, and make room for on the site. “We care that you make your choices between right and wrong,” Wong said. While Wong wrote there may have been idealistic or moral reasons to ban the subreddit, that’s not what reddit was actually acting on. Instead, the closure was due to the issues of rights and the influx of takedown requests.

Hours later, admin Jason Harvey followed up on Wong’s post. Harvey said that rights problems with r/TheFappening was not the whole story: the subreddit was actually crushing the entire site under the weight of its traffic. “The amount of traffic hitting this content was breaking the site in various ways,” Harvey wrote. “I had to break /r/thefappening a few times to keep the site from completely falling over, which as expected resulted in an immediate creation of a new slew of subreddits.”

Menese told Wired that the subreddit drew in over a quarter billion pageviews during its week-ish existence. On its peak traffic day, September 1, r/TheFappening cleared 141 million views.

By September 2, traffic plummeted to 45 million visits, and the fall-off continued from there. “It’s sad that reddit already made their money and then made a show of banning [r/TheFappening],” Menese said. After the weekend r/TheFappening was shuttered, reddit raised $50 million in funding, putting the company’s valuation at $500 million.

Harvey reported feeling conflicted about the traffic windfall that came from the massive privacy violation of over a dozen women. “I had an obvious responsibility to keep the site up and running, but seeing that all of my efforts were due to a huge number of people scrambling to look at stolen private photos didn’t sit well with me personally, to say the least,” he wrote.

Wong, on the other hand, wrote that reddit only reacts proactively to imminent physical threats. Everything else, its leaders “choose to influence by exhortation, emphasizing positive examples, or by selectively highlighting good content.” Menese’s testimony only reinforces this—reddit’s idealistic guidance let r/TheFappening exist, the site didn’t believe it had a responsibility to be proactive about the subreddit, and it was able to profit significantly from the whole thing, too.

Disclosure: Ars Technica is owned by Conde Nast, which shares a parent company, Advance Publications, with reddit.

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Casey Johnston Freelancer

Casey Johnston Freelancer

Casey Johnston is the former Culture Editor at Ars Technica, and now does the occasional freelance story. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Applied Physics.