14 DAY TRIAL // Not quite the resounding acquisition someone might be expecting, but Reddit indeed made its first move on another business. The company bought redditgifts.com, a Secret Santa project started by two of its own users after a community discussion.
RedditGifts started back in 2009, after public talks on Reddit requested a Secret Santa drive be organized for site users.
And so redditgifts.com was born, a place where Reddit users are paired together and have to send gifts to each other on certain holidays.
The site gained huge popularity, growing from 4,500 members in 2009 to almost 17,000 participants in the Secret Santa 2010 record-breaking event, while Secret Santa 2011 is on pace to reach 30,000+ users.
To date, RedditGifts helped 42,771 users in 106 countries, exchange gifts worth $1,458,891.
The project's success was so great, that they invented a special event called “Arbitrary Day” (June 25th), as a way to exchange gifts for no peculiar reason.
Reddit didn't mention how much it payed for RedditGifts, but don't be surprised this to be a simple acquisition by hiring.
As three years ago, redditgifts.com is still run by the same people that created it, Dan McComas (user kickme444?) and Jessica Moreno (user 5days).
As the site got bigger, the two couldn't keep pace with the amount of work required to manage public campaigns this size, and their spare time faded away month after month.
Reddit wasn't indifferent at all, helping the two with in-house ads and free server storage.
Apparently RedditGifts' success was large enough to convince Reddit in acquiring them and officially bringing the two founders under the same umbrella, putting an end to any looming time management issues.
Even if we don't have all the details, this seems more of a helping hand from Reddit, which opted to bring the two on board and pay them to work on the site full-time as their day job.
Of no means this could have been a stretch for Reddit, which recently moved into larger, more modern HQ, and went on various hiring sprees, all while finally overtaking its main rival Digg.
As for future plans, following Reddit's direction, RedditGifts' platform will also be available under an open-source license, the service will remain available under the same domain, as a separate site from Reddit and the founders will still remain in charge.