If you saw Kate Upton or Jennifer Lawrence naked last week, there's a good chance you saw them on the social news site Reddit. The self-proclaimed "front page of the Internet" was one of the main outlets linking to the celebrity nude photographs hacked from Apple's iCloud accounts and leaked across the web. Over the weekend, Reddit cleaned up the portions of the site devoted to the stolen photos---but not before it had made a significant chunk of revenue from its role in the massive celebrity sext-spillage.1
In just six days, Reddit earned enough money from the nude pics scandal to power its servers for roughly a month, says John Menese, the 33-year-old creator of a Reddit sub-forum expressly launched to share the photos. That statistic, he says, is based on how many times members of the subreddit paid for so-called Reddit "gold," the $3.99-per-month premium accounts that users often gift to each other to bestow a few extra features and prestige. Each subreddit publicly displays the amount of server time paid for by its members' Reddit gold, and Menese tracked his forum's contribution until just before it went offline. His estimate of the site's take from the sext scandal doesn't include any advertising revenue the site may have made from the quarter billion pageviews Menese's subreddit created during its short time on the web.
"If Reddit had wanted to, they could have banned us on Sunday when our traffic broke their servers," says Menese, a 33-year old salesman at a Las Vegas call center. "Instead, they chose to milk a week of publicity and a month of server time in Reddit gold before they stepped in."
Menese and another moderator of the subreddit, which they called TheFappening in a reference to Reddit's lingo for masturbation, say that Reddit credited their users for paying for at least 27 days worth of site server time before the forum was banned Saturday. For comparison, that would mean it generated about half as much revenue from Reddit gold in six days as the site's "programming" subreddit, the oldest on the site, earned in the four years since Reddit's gold program was created.
Reddit staff didn't respond to WIRED's request for comment on its financial rewards from its TheFappening scandal. But one administrator admitted in a long note about the staff's ambivalence on the issue that it had "hit new traffic milestones, ones which I'd be ashamed to share publicly."
That immense traffic, however, already was waning when Reddit banned TheFappening. At its peak on September 1st, the site pulled in 141 million visitors in a day, according to numbers Menese accessed as a moderator of the subreddit. By September 2, it only attracted 45 million pageviews. By September 6, when Reddit finally pulled TheFappening from the site, the majority of the forum's users visitors likely had moved on.
"It’s sad that Reddit already made their money and then made a show of banning the site," says Menese.
That belated filtering, long after Reddit had received the majority of the scandal's financial benefits, provides ammunition to critics; they accuse it of profiting from its anything-goes community at the expense of victims like the women whose photos were hacked from Apple's iCloud accounts and subjected to its users' horny feeding frenzy. The issue is particularly timely as the site seeks to raise a new round of investment at a valuation higher than $500 million. As T.C. Sottek wrote at the Verge, "Reddit is a kleptocracy that speaks to lofty virtues while profiting from vice," and went on to compare TheFappening to "sexual assault, condoned by a state that earns revenue from it."
In a statement on the scandal, Reddit CEO Yishan Wong was sympathetic but unapologetic about Reddit's linking to the photos. "We understand the harm that misusing our site does to the victims of this theft, and we deeply sympathize," he wrote. "Having said that, we are unlikely to make changes to our existing site content policies in response to this specific event." (Reddit is owned by Advance Publications, the parent company of Condé Nast, which owns WIRED.)
Menese, for his part, is unrepentant about his involvement in violating the privacy of a dozen innocent women. He argues that TheFappening only linked to the images, and that he wasn't involved in their initial theft. He points to other existing corners of Reddit focused on stolen nudes, like the "celebs" subreddit or "candid fashion police," where users post creep shots of women under the guise of critiquing their fashion sense. "There are lots of other subreddits that have questionable content," he says. "But they’re still up right now because people whose photos are on them don’t have lawyers."
He's still not sure why those sites---along with far more hideous ones like WatchPeopleDie and SexyAbortions---are allowed to persist while his own forum was banned. "Reddit basically stands up for free speech until it becomes inconvenient for them to do so," he says.
Or, he might have added, until it no longer helps them pay their server costs.
1*Correction 3:25pm 9/10/2014: An earlier version of this story stated that Reddit hosted the stolen images, when in fact they were merely linked from the site. *
