Reddit Gives More Love to Trending Subtopics

Reddit, the massively trafficked link-sharing site that hosts billions of page views per month, is beginning to change how its site treats popular content.

For years, the front page of Reddit has shown a long list of links to comment threads, outside websites and photos, all sorted into different categories called “Subreddits.” While there are more than 7,000 different Subreddits on the site, it has been difficult to find all of them unless they end up on the popular front page.

Now, you’ll start seeing “trending Subreddits” on the top of the front page, which is exactly what it sounds like: Subreddits that are seeing lots of traffic will show as trending, ostensibly a better way to show off the most active stuff on the site.

The change comes little more than a week after my interview with business development heads Ellen Pao and Jena Donlin, both of whom said Reddit would be experimenting with user interface changes to better show off new threads to people who browse the site.

The point here, I imagine, is to better showcase the power of Subreddits to both users and advertisers, who can buy ads to run at the top of specific Subreddits. The more traffic a Subreddit gets, the more views and potential clicks an ad will get.

It also helps advertisers find these Subreddits much more easily, which can be helpful for targeting. So, for example, if you’re Microsoft and want to pitch a product that would be interesting to engineers, buying an ad in the “developers” Subreddit is probably a good way to do that.

As Pao and Donlin noted, I imagine there are more changes to come. Keep an eye out for them.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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