The drama at Reddit sure hasn't hurt traffic

By: Matt Weinberger

July was a record month for link sharing and community site Reddit, with a record 8 billion pageviews and 195 million monthly visitors, according to the site's own public-facing stats.
Reddit had a tough July. After a popular employee was apparently fired, users revolted. The backlash eventually led CEO Ellen Pao to step down, and she was replaced by Reddit founder Steve Huffman - who almost immediately proposed a set of controversial rules to help police the site.

It was a lot of drama. But in the wake of all of that, Reddit has never been more popular.

In May, Reddit had 175 million unique visitors. In June, it had 177 million unique visitors. That means that with July's 195 million figure, Reddit is growing almost nine times faster than it was before the drama, as TechCrunch points out.

It's a counterpoint to the notion that competing sites, primarily Voat, are eating Reddit's readership.

Still, it's possible that a lot of those new readers and visitors just wanted to see what was going on during the ongoing controversy. The real test, for Reddit as both a community and an advertising-based business, will be if they stay around.