Marketing Pilgrim

Another acquisition for your reading pleasure. This time, TechCrunch is reporting Conde Nast, owner of Wired magazine among others, has acquired social bookmarking site Reddit.

All four reddit employees will relocate from Boston to Wired’s San Francisco office and become part of Wired Digital. Reddit, founded and funded in 2005, is a YCombinator company (see our interview with YCombinator founder Paul Graham here). The two original founders are Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, and they were later joined by Christopher Slowe and Aaron Swartz.

Reddit works a lot like Digg. Although the user base is not as large as Digg’s, Reddit has certainly started to show-up a lot more in my referral logs.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out for Conde. Did they get Reddit for a deal, hoping to get a better price before it grows to the size of Digg? Or, will Reddit lose steam, now that it’s part of a larger more traditional parent company?

UPDATE: I just got the official press release from Conde Nast. Here’s an extract…

“We’re thrilled to become a home for this young company that has grown to more than one million unique users a month by building such an open and democratic community for the social filtering of news,� Karimkhany said. “Our goal will be to build Reddit as an independent company by collaborating with Wired through the integration of its core technology, and by offering partnerships to allow other companies to do the same.�

“We’re excited about the opportunity to work with Wired Digital, and to gain the resources to give us the freedom to accomplish many of the goals we’ve been dreaming about,� said Huffman.

Wired’s parent company, Condé Nast, has already used Reddit technology to launch a beta site, Lipstick.com, for the social filtering of celebrity news.

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