Reddit Made a Huge Amount of Money Off "The Fappening" Before Banning it

"The Fappening" made Reddit a lot of money before the site banned it.

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Image via Complex Original
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Over the weekend, Reddit, aka "the butthole front page of the Internet," banned its user generated page devoted to linking to nude photos stolen from various celebrities, which masturbation humorists/enthusiasts called "The Fappening."

But Reddit didn't take down /r/thefappening until it had already made a ton of money from those photos of Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton and other stars, John Menese, the perv guy who created the sub-forum told Wired. 

Over six days that /r/thefappening was active, Reddit earned enough money through the subreddit's users buying Reddit "gold" (premium accounts) to power its expensive servers for 27 days, Menese said. Reddit publicly displays how much server time each subreddit has paid for, and Mense kept close track of his.

To put that in perspective, the oldest subreddit on the site, /r/programming, has taken four years to pay for that much server time, Wired reports

None of these even factors in how much Reddit made off The Fappening from advertising traffic, but it was probably a whole lot since The Fappening generated an estimated quarter-billion pageviews, including 146 million visits to Reddit on the first day that the photo leak went mainstream.

Of course, by the time Reddit decided to wipe /r/thefappening from the face of the Internet, traffic had already slowed wayyy down. 


“If Reddit had wanted to, they could have banned us on Sunday when our traffic broke their servers,” Menese told Wired. “Instead, they chose to milk a week of publicity and a month of server time in Reddit gold before they stepped in.” 

Money is a hell of a drug. 

[Via New York Magazine]

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