Reddit Reveals Its Plan for Paying Users $5 Million

Christine Lagorio-Chafkin

They're called Reddit Notes, and there aren't enough for everyone. What's up with that?

In a rare and perhaps unprecedented move, Reddit announced in September that one-tenth of its latest massive funding round wouldn't be used for, well, any of the things investors might generally hope it is used for. Not expanding product lines. Not hiring. Not broadening an international presence.

No, Reddit would instead give 10 percent of the $50 million round back to the community.

The logic in the $5 million in gifts to redditors? A blog post on September 30, 2014, said the logic is to allow the community to own some form of Reddit, "in recognition of the central role the community plays in Reddit's ongoing success."

Today, another post detailed how that payout would work, and both a founder and a manager of the new project, called Reddit Notes, elucidated fresh details exclusively for Inc. (Here's the inside story of how Reddit Notes were years in the making.)

The basics include:

  • The roughly $5 million from the funding round will be divided into about a million parts.

  • 950,00 Reddit Notes will be distributed to active users.

  • "Active users" are defined by folks active with a username before the end of September, 2014.

  • There are about six or seven million active redditors, so only one out of six or seven will be given a single Reddit Note.

  • Notes will be distributed via lottery this fall.

Here's what else we've learned about the Reddit Notes project. And here's the full Reddit post from Friday:

We raised some funding in September, and we promised to reserve a portion to give back to the community. If you’re hearing about this for the first time, check out the official blog post here.

A few weeks ago, we asked you what you thought would be the best ways for us to follow through on the promise. Thank you to the thousands of you who participated. You shared with us a variety of creative ideas--from donating to charities, to crowdfunding community-sourced projects, to customized "thank yous" for individual contributions to reddit.

Well, we’re excited to share that with the future distribution of reddit notes, you should be able to accomplish all these goals. We've made progress on the specifics, and we’re finally able to share with you more of how reddit notes will roll out!

To celebrate all of you and your contributions, we plan to give away reddit notes in a random lottery. As of this point, it looks like we’re going to have approximately 950,000 reddit notes to divide among active user accounts.

There aren't as many reddit notes as there are accounts, so we'll be distributing them like a lottery. If you get one, lucky you! Eligible recipients of reddit notes will be determined based on activities before 9/30 (when we first announced this project), and we plan to give them away in the fall of 2015.

We're still working out details especially on how reddit notes will work within existing government regulations. We are working out more details on both the technological and legal aspects of the project, and we’re looking forward to sharing that information with you early next year. If you have feedback or ideas for us, feel free to visit r/redditnotes--and keep being awesome!

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