What happened
2010 was a breakout year for Reddit's audience. Monthly pageviews climbed from roughly 250 million in January 2010 to about 829 million by December, an increase of around 232 percent over the year. One month later the figure passed one billion monthly pageviews, with Reddit crossing that milestone in January 2011. To keep up with demand, the site more than doubled its server count from about 50 to 119 machines during the year.
Much of the surge was attributed to the collapse of rival link-aggregator Digg, whose unpopular "v4" redesign in 2010 alienated a large portion of its user base and drove many of them to Reddit. The migration accelerated Reddit's transformation into one of the web's dominant social-news destinations and validated its community-driven, subreddit-based model just as Reddit Gold was establishing a new revenue stream. The momentum set the stage for Reddit's operational spin-out as an independent subsidiary of Advance Publications in September 2011 and for the platform's rapid cultural and political influence in the years that followed.