According to the numbers, social news website Reddit had an amazing 2010, more than tripling its pageviews at the expense of Digg, its longtime rival.

Reddit, a subsidiary of Conde Nast, reports that it garnered 250 million pageviews in January 2010. While that's nothing to sneeze at, it paled in comparison to Digg's accelerating growth.

Fast forward to today. Reddit revealed that it received 829 million pageviews in December 2010, an increase of 231.6% from January. Not only that, but average time on site is up as well (from 12 minutes and 41 seconds to 15 minutes and 21 seconds). On the other hand, Digg had just 200 million pageviews in July; and every indicator we have seen says that number is shrinking, not growing.

Reddit's also more than doubled its number of servers from 50 to 119, increased its disk memory from 16TB to 48TB and increased its delivery of bytes from 10.1 trillion to 44.4 trillion, all with the same number of engineers on staff (four). In contrast, Digg recently made major staff cuts, although it still has more than four times the staff and more unique visitors, according to Compete and comScore.

The takeaway: Reddit gained big, partially due to the failure of Digg Version 4 and the ensuing exodus of users.

Can Reddit keep it up in 2011? And what will Conde Nast do with its now-hot Internet company? We invite you to speculate in the comments.





