Reddit's popularity has surged in recent months, as the social news service now gets more than 3 billion pageviews a month and has 43 million monthly active users. Now, a new report suggests that Reddit's valuation has grown as well.

George Anders at Forbes looked through Reddit's most recent incorporation papers, updated a few months ago in Delaware, and found a provision in the documents from Advance Publications — the parent company of Conde Nast which owns Reddit — setting a $240 million sale price for Reddit as a benchmark for determining the allocation of preferred stock.

"Advance bought $20 million of convertible preferred stock in Reddit and put in provisions saying that if Reddit is ever sold for less than $240 million, the conversion terms will be rejiggered so that Advance comes away with a bigger slice of Reddit and employees get less," Anders writes in the report. Based on this, he argues that Reddit's owners clearly believes the company was on pace to be worth at least that much.

To be sure, this is still a ballpark figure, but it would put Reddit close to the level of major media properties like The Huffington Post, which was acquired by AOL for just more than $300 million last year. This would also put Reddit in line with Digg, its former competitor, which was once valued at around $200 million at its peak — though Digg was ultimately sold off to Betaworks for just $500,000 earlier this year.

Either way, Advance Publications stands to make a nice profit from Reddit if and when it chooses to sell it off, as Conde Nast reportedly purchased Reddit for about $20 million back in 2006.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Eva Blue