Wired Digital has purchased the personalized social news aggregation website Reddit, the company announced Tuesday.
Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Reddit, which has four full-time employees, will move from Boston to Wired Digital's headquarters in San Francisco. It will operate under the Wired Digital umbrella along with Wired News, the daily technology news publication.
CondéNet, which owns and operates Wired Digital, Epicurious.com and Style.com, among other properties, plans to incorporate Reddit's personalized news aggregation and other Web 2.0 technologies into the various online destinations maintained by CondéNet and its parent company, Condé Nast Publications.
CondéNet has already used Reddit technology to launch Lipstick.com, a beta site that aggregates links to celebrity gossip news stories.
"Our aim is to grow our internet position through acquisitions and innovative partnerships," said Steve Newhouse, chairman of the Advance.net web division of Advance Publications, the parent company of Condé Nast.
Reddit was founded in 2005 by college roommates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian upon their graduation from the University of Virginia. The service aggregates news stories submitted by users and filters those submissions based on user votes.
Much like popular social news site Digg.com, links are promoted to the Reddit front page as the site's users apply positive votes to the stories they find interesting. Users can also append negative votes to stories that are of poor quality or that fail to capture their interest. Web content posted to Reddit tends to center on politics, opinion and world news. Various topical subsections, called "subreddits," concentrate on niche topics such as science and computer programming.
"We're thrilled to become a home for this young company that has grown to more than 1 million unique users a month by building such an open and democratic community for the social filtering of news," said Kourosh Karimkhany, general manager of Wired Digital. "Our goal will be to build Reddit as an independent company by collaborating with Wired through the integration of its core technology, and by offering partnerships to allow others to do the same."
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