Social media site Reddit recently asked its readers to help it out financially, as it was running out of staff and means to keep the site running. An odd request, given that Reddit is owned by a billion-dollar corporation, Conde Nast, but its owner has a fixed budget for the site — and that budget is simply not enough, Reddit's admins claimed.

The plea was a huge success, claims Reddit in a blog post today, with about 6,000 Reddit members donating. However, the effort to "save" Reddit changed its business model in an unexpected and interesting way.

At first, users who donated were only promised a badge on their user accounts. Now, Reddit writes the "gold" status that donors received will give them additional benefits, which effectively means that Reddit has turned freemium. From the blog post:

"As soon as possible, we're going to start giving our gold supporters something more than just a trophy. Now that the pilot has succeeded so well, we're going to grow reddit gold into a bona fide subscription service a la TotalFark or Ars Technica. ... As always, we're taking suggestions for which cool things we should work on first. Our aim is to get something out to you by this time next week."

This goes on to show that a very dedicated community can sometimes shape not only your service — which has been the case with social media sites such as Digg and Reddit alike — but also your business plan. On the other hand, it also shows that being owned by a huge corporation does not always equal financial freedom. We look forward to seeing how this new freemium financing model works out for Reddit.