Reddit Creates Authentic, Targeted Content By Democracy

The self-proclaimed “front page of the internet,” is now creating original content in a truly democratic way that reflects the character of their platform. Reddit announced in their latest foray into original programming with an inspirational life-story web series Formative, built in collaboration with their r/Entrepreneur community and Google Cloud Platform.

The idea behind the project is for successful entrepreneurs to relate their story of success in a brief video that can help inspire the next generation of builders and dreamers. Since this series is aimed at the Reddit’s highly-opinionated and vocal audience, the choice of subjects was put to a vote to ensure a deep level of engagement from Reddit’s audience. In a process that makes Netflix’s creation-via-usage-data strategy look quaint, Reddit gathered the names of potential people to profile from its users and then had the community upvote the entrepreneurs that interested them most.

In the end, users liked the idea of including well-known folks like Tesla/SpaceX founder Elon Musk, Amazon honcho Jeff Bezos, and Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. But when the final tally was in, YouTube entrepreneur and Beme CEO Casey Neistat won the first round and he’s featured on the inaugural episode, which quickly shot up to almost half a million views.

Reddit admitted that Neistat is a bit easier to get into their quick timeline for production. While he’s a successful business owner and has a YouTube subscriber count of over a million followers, he’s much more accessible than Internet billionaires that run massive businesses. That might also be why the second episode features ‪Rana el Kaliouby, co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Affectiva.

Formative isn’t the first original content from Reddit but it’s certainly the best example so far of the platform developing something that’s both highly-targeted to its users and embodies the soul of what the site is all about. Like their video editions of the site’s popular “Ask Me Anything” threads, Formative engages its audience by asking the community to be part of the content-creation experience itself.