We already know Reddit gets more than 2 billion pageviews a month, but now you can watch that massive traffic flow live. Reddit’s newest feature shows you a live snapshot of the number of users interacting with a given community.
If you check the front page of Reddit’s largest subreddit, r/funny, for instance, you’ll see that 12,010 users are online right now (though by the time you read this, that number will surely have changed).
Importantly, those numbers only show how many registered users are checking the page—not how many people are viewing it. Considering the 100/10/1 rule (for every piece of content created, there are 10 people who will engage with it and 100 who will consume it), it’s a fair bet that the real number of people on a given subreddit is far greater than the official number.
What’s all that data mean? Luckily for us, redditor Deimorz is on the case.
Deimorz is Reddit’s volunteer statistical superhero. He occasionally scrapes Reddit’s data and publishes his results to the thinking-redditor’s subreddit, r/theoryofreddit. (His volunteer work doesn’t stop there. He’s also created the popular and time-saving auto-moderator bot).
In his latest bit of number crunching, he looked at the new numbers over time, scraping Reddit’s largest subreddits every hour for a full day.Which subreddit is the busiest? And which sees highest ratio of visitors to subscribers?
Here are his numbers. (The full dataset is available here)
Top 10 subreddits with the highest average number of users online
|
# |
Subreddit |
Subscribers |
Min. Online |
Max Online |
Avg. Online |
|
1 |
2,079,283 |
8,024 |
23,019 |
16,653 |
|
|
2 |
2,290,290 |
6,707 |
21,175 |
14,350 |
|
|
3 |
1,898,290 |
4,631 |
14,558 |
9,935 |
|
|
4 |
1,864,395 |
6,115 |
17,081 |
9,205 |
|
|
5 |
2,235,701 |
3,087 |
15,016 |
7,863 |
|
|
6 |
129,715 |
2,677 |
6,599 |
4,537 |
|
|
7 |
1,741,034 |
2,435 |
7,081 |
4,309 |
|
|
8 |
1,883,862 |
1,665 |
5,680 |
3,754 |
|
|
9 |
1,775,706 |
944 |
6,477 |
3,567 |
|
|
10 |
1,268,890 |
1,491 |
7,691 |
3,525 |
Top 10 subreddits with the highest ratio of average users online / subscribers
|
# |
Subreddit |
Subscribers |
Avg. Users Online |
Ratio |
|
1 |
129,715 |
4,537 |
0.03498 |
|
|
2 |
43,366 |
1,344 |
0.03099 |
|
|
3 |
61,671 |
1,459 |
0.02366 |
|
|
4 |
24,826 |
572 |
0.02304 |
|
|
5 |
80,957 |
1,830 |
0.02260 |
|
|
6 |
37,051 |
806 |
0.02175 |
|
|
7 |
38,877 |
784 |
0.02017 |
|
|
8 |
111,241 |
1,669 |
0.01500 |
|
|
9 |
212,155 |
2,915 |
0.01374 |
|
|
10 |
71,083 |
868 |
0.01221 |
It’s hardly shocking that so many of the truly busiest subreddits—the ones with the highest ratio of subscribers to visitors—are gaming and television subreddits. Deimorz noted that the latest episode of Breaking Bad came out just two hours after he started his scraping process, so it’s little surprise that the subreddit’s numbers are so impressive. (There are similar reasons for the popularity of other subreddits in the top 10, Deimorz observed).
The lesson, if any, is this: Smaller subreddits encourage more active communities, especially those that have really specific focus.
Redditor thatguydr summarized it more succinctly: “The more you feel like you’re a part of something, the more you contribute.”
Photo by jeffisageek