The Viral Guru Who Could Influence Your Daily News -- But You Might Not Have Heard of Him by Name

Note: TheBlaze Editor-in-Chief Scott Baker will be doing a live webcast with Alexis Ohanian this morning at 11am ET.  You can watch the show by clicking here! (If you have trouble viewing the interview, we've found trying a different browser can help.)

You might not know the lingo -- upvote, giving gold, AMA. You might not consider it the "front page of the Internet" as its tagline suggests.

The Reddit alien (Image source: Reddit)

But the social news site Reddit and its community of users driving viral content are likely impacting you -- or could impact you -- more than you think. And you probably don't even realize it or have even heard of the men behind it by name.

The site, similar to Facebook, was started by college kids. Since its creation by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in 2005, the site has grown to be among the top 50 in the U.S, seeing more than 85 million unique visitors last month.

Our nation's president hosted an "Ask Me Anything" (AMA, if you were wondering) on it -- along with a slew of other notables. It has been a go-to site for crowd-sourced information in the face of national tragedy (although it's been blasted for pushing false information and it's seedy side). It has also helped drive the rejection -- at least for now -- of controversial anti-piracy legislation, joining many sites in the blackout protest of 2012.

Redditors -- the users of the free site driving what makes it onto the front page and top of "subreddits" for the casual user to see without digging -- are mostly male and young (between 18-29 years old). In terms of political sentiment, stories frequently upvoted to the top (which means the userbase likes the story) seems to suggest Redditors lean more libertarian and advocate for a free Internet.

Why should you care about them?

With Redditors digging through the bowels of the interwebs to find nuggets that can be turned into viral gold, often catching the national eye after they start trending on the site, it might come as a surprise to some to learn that only 6 percent of Intent using adults say they are Redditors.

So the opportunity to drive a conversation or bring news that matters to the masses is there.

Ohanian, a self-described "start-up guy" with the goal of "making the world suck less," left Reddit in 2009 and went on to start the travel site Hipmunk and the consulting company Das Kaptial Capital.

Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian joined a protest like Web giant Wikipedia for a 24-hour blackout against U.S. legislation aimed at shutting down sites that share pirated movies and other content. Reddit.com shut down its social news service for 12 hours. (AP/Richard Drew)

He recently published a new book, "Without Their Permission," and has been on tour promoting it and its message about "how the 21st century will be made, not managed."

“I want to knock entrepreneurship off its pedestal,” he said, according to a recent post on Read Write Web. “I’m taking the book tour directly to millenials, the people that are forced to create their own careers.”

In a recent op-ed for Future Tense, a collaboration between Arizona State University, the New America Foundation and Slate, Ohanian tackled the "innovation crisis" in America.

"The best way to incubate innovation and entrepreneurship is found at the intersection of college and supplemental education," Ohanian wrote.

"This intersection of traditional and supplemental education creates a potent mix for success," he added later to his opinion that more and more college in the traditional sense is not always the answer, but it still helps.

TheBlaze will be hosting a webcast with Ohainan Wednesday at 11 a.m. Join Editor-in-Chief Scott Baker as he asks the viral guru about conservatives place on Reddit, about the influence of such sites on the dissemination of information, about the future of innovation and more.

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