Reddit surpassed 2 billion pageviews during the month of December, the social news site’s general manager, Erik Martin, told the Daily Dot.

That’s more than double the traffic the site saw over the same period in 2010—when it registered 829 million pageviews—and eight times the January 2010 total, which topped out at 250 million. Unique visitors, meanwhile, have nearly tripled, from about 12.5 million in December 2010 to 35 million last month.

The numbers cap off a banner year for Reddit. As the site’s traffic has grown, so has its influence: 2011 saw Reddit launch massive, record-breaking fundraising campaigns, exert boycott power on a major technology company, and launch nascent political careers.

It also established itself as the driving force behind the popularization of web culture, spawning original memes, propagating rage comics, and even launching Hollywood screenwriting careers.

What lies ahead for Reddit in 2012? Can it continue to absorb millions of new users, or has it reached critical mass?

We’re expecting 2012 to be an even bigger year for Reddit, with the site influencing mainstream politics and rivaling Twitter as a home for crowd-sourced journalism online. And the Daily Dot will be there, chronicling “the front page of the Internet” every step of the way.