Reddit 'to launch stand-alone news site: Upvoted'

The aggregation site Reddit is to launch a stand-alone news website, according to reports.

The firm reportedly plans to produce stories from content posted on the parent site, as well as content paid for and approved by advertisers.

According to Wired, external, the site will be called Upvoted, a reference to the way Reddit users show approval of posts.

The move indicates Reddit's desire to grow and make money from its audience, an analyst said.

Thomas Caldecott, who works on the media team at Enders Analysis, told the BBC that Reddit's demographics were "heavily skewed towards 18-24-year-old males". He added that the "uncontrolled nature of its user generated content-centric forums have made it a risky environment for brands".

The new site, he said, reflected concerns over the "difficulties of growing audiences beyond dedicated core followings and the pressing need to monetise these audiences through effective advertising formats".

He said Upvoted was reminiscent, in that respect, of Twitter's Project Lightning, which is designed to help users follow news events with curated content from the social media platform under its "Moments" feature, which was launched on Tuesday.

According to Wired, the new site will employ a 10-strong editorial team and will initially seek to publish about 20 stories per day - increasing to about 40 in time. It said it was due to be launched on Tuesday and that the team would concentrate on investigating content posted on Reddit's forums, a practice currently employed by many news organisations, but not previously by Reddit itself.

Its members will reportedly interview the users who posted content they are covering in an attempt to work out the truth behind them and to get more background.

Unlike Reddit, it is not thought that the site will allow comments and, despite its name, will offer no "upvote" function. On Reddit, users can vote links posted by others either up or down.

Wired quoted Vickie Chang, who is due to head the Upvoted team, as saying: "Everything will have a direct tie back to Reddit. I want to find the tiny thread that connects it back to Reddit.

"Unfortunately, rather than telling that story, some news outlets take our users' content and repackage it as their own. They don't tell the back story of our communities. We think our users' stories need to be told, but with them at the centre of it," the Upvoted team told Wired.

Asked whether she would cover stories critical of Reddit's leadership, Chang said that nothing was "off the table... I don't have any hard steadfast rules... If it's a topic of discussion, the community is always going to be our first priority".

Chang's team will also reportedly produce paid-for content, on which the advertisers will have sign off. "It could be a piece on Tesla, a piece on how wifi works. No matter what, it will be good content and it will just happened to be sponsored," Chang said.

Mr Caldecott said that an unclear delineation between the two could be problematic for Upvoted and its parent site.

"The need for delineation between sponsored and editorial content [varies] greatly, depending on the brand. For fashion magazine titles at Conde Nast, [content paid for by advertisers] has always been part of their remit.

"For a trusted quality news brands, such as the Financial Times, overstepping the line between editorial and advertising would be very harmful.

"Reddit falls into [the latter] category. Its main unique selling point is authenticity and giving voice to its readers - values that are hard to promote if it is using parts of its new service to aggressively promote its brands."

Upvoted.com, a Wordpress blog, was marked as private on Tuesday morning (BST), making any content on it unavailable to the public. But the URL was registered to the same California address as Reddit's parent site. Reddit did not respond to a request for comment.