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Reddit surges to 1 billion monthly page views

Social news site continues to see strong growth, hitting 1 billion monthly page views. Back in July, it had about 400 million page views.

Don Reisinger
CNET contributor Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has covered everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Besides his work with CNET, Don's work has been featured in a variety of other publications including PC World and a host of Ziff-Davis publications.
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Don Reisinger
2 min read

Reddit has joined an exclusive club on the Internet.

The Conde Nast-owned social news site announced yesterday that, for the first time, its monthly traffic exceeded 1 billion page views in January, according to statistics from Google Analytics that Reddit offered in a blog post. It is now among the 100 sites on the Web with that much traffic, according to Reddit.

"This is an accomplishment that all redditors should take pride in, because people wouldn't keep arriving in droves--and coming back--if not for the community that you've created here," Reddit spokesman Mike Schiraldi said yesterday in the blog post.

The company also reported more than 13,750,000 unique visitors last month.

Reddit's growth has been nothing short of astounding over the past year. In January 2010, Reddit had about 250 million page views. Back in July, Reddit announced that it had over 429 million page views between June 14 and July 14. In December 2010, its monthly page views rose to 829 million.

Meanwhile, Digg, formerly the leader in social news, has watched its traffic plummet.

In the summer, Digg unveiled site revision V4, a launch that many in the community believed gave more power to publishers and took it from Digg's own users. In response, the Digg community lashed out and started pushing Reddit stories to the site's home page.

They also left.

Hitwise reported in late Septemer that Digg traffic was down 26 percent in the U.S. and 34 percent in the U.K. in just four weeks. At peak, Hitwise said, Digg had 40 million unique visitors. In an interview posted yesterday on Digg, company CEO Matt Williams revealed that the site now has less than 20 million unique visitors.

That figure is nothing to scoff at. But a quick glance at Digg's home page reveals the community isn't as active as it once was. As of this writing, just two "Top News" items on the Digg home page had more than 200 Diggs. A year ago, some stories needed that many Diggs just to make it to the home page.

Reddit's home page, on the other hand, has several stories with over 2,000 points.