In 2006, Condé Nast, the New York-based publisher of Vogue and the New Yorker, among other magazines, bought a promising information-sharing and online-discussion startup called Reddit. At the time, social media was just taking off and big media conglomerates were scrambling for a piece of the action. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. had recently outfoxed Sumner Redstone’s Viacom to acquire Myspace for $580 million. In a seller’s market, Condé Nast managed to pick up Reddit for a reported $20 million. The site worked out of the same offices in San Francisco as another Condé title, Wired. Things were chummy. The corporate parent back East was extremely hands-off, and Reddit’s community of users—Redditors—grew to the millions. For a time, as Myspace imploded and Reddit turned into the town hall of the digital era, Condé Nast looked like a bunch of geniuses.
Today, after much executive turnover and countless incidents of questionable Redditor behavior, Condé Nast and its titles would prefer you not think of Reddit as theirs.
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