By Erika Icon

YNOT – Reddit has become quite popular over the past few months. Mashable reports the site gets more than three billion page views a month and has 43 million active monthly users.

Advance Publications bought Reddit for $20 million in 2006. The Conde Nast parent recently set a $240 million value on the company as “a benchmark of determining the allocation of preferred stock.” That makes Reddit’s market value similar to AOL-owned Huffington Post.

So what is Reddit, exactly? The property calls itself a social news site and employs the slogan “the front page to the internet.” As on other social media websites, registered users post links or self-generated text, and other users vote thumbs up or down on each submission. At its heart, Reddit is a bulletin board. The front page, called the main reddit (a corruption of “read it”), contains a collection of the most highly rated posts. Inside pages, called subreddits, are organized by content category.

Free to join and use, the site rapidly is becoming a primary source for new and popular things on the web. Anyone may post as long as they have an account. To prevent spamming, the service caps the number of submissions that may be posted in a given amount of time. Users earn karma points based on the popularity of their posts.

Reddit can be an excellent marketing tool on both small and large scales. Particularly helpful are appearances in a section called “Ask Me Anything.” Kink.com owner Peter Acworth discovered the value of AMA when he took questions from Reddit users about his sexual history, California’s Measure B, the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon and other fetish topics. In addition to demystifying BDSM, he Acworth’s appearance also likely increased Kink’s traffic by interacting with a willing, curious audience that might otherwise have been reluctant to engage with a genre of adult content the mainstream tends to view as a bit scary.

Adult performer James Deen also took part in an AMA session prior to the Los Angeles County election in November. For three hours, Deen fielded questions about Measure B and condom usage on adult film sets.

Others who’ve engaged in AMA sessions to promote themselves and their work include President Barack Obama, This American Life creator Ira Glass and TV host Larry King, as well as a number of well-known novelists.

Subreddits, too, offer promotional opportunities. Essentially mini-forums, subreddits cover every topic under the sun. Some subreddits are devoted to name-brand consumer products, but the most active have names like sex, porn, NSFW, freexxxvideos, Porn-Tubes and circlejerk. Subreddit posts may be anonymous or under a user’s real name.

AskReddit is a subreddit that allows users to ask direct questions and receive a wide range of answers from the community. For marketing purposes, it’s like a focus group on crack. As long as questions are relevant, nothing is off-limits. The potential for gaining market insight here is enormous.

Some users post giveaways and freebies, hoping to build interest and brand loyalty. The community can be cynical and sarcastic, so sometimes the tactic backfires. Incentive offers that have legitimate value usually are respected, but the community is quick to criticize anything it perceives as a sham or sales pitch.

One final word: Journalists and bloggers crawl Reddit as a source for story ideas. While submitting a post specifically requesting coverage for a product, service or person is considered gauche and most likely will be ignored, popular or intriguing posts often draw attention from the press.

In the dog-eat-dog world of marketing, it’s important to find creative, cost-effective promotional outlets, no matter the product. Reddit’s uncensored, wide open spaces can be a boon if they’re approached in the right way.