Ringing in the new year, Reddit took to its blog to share the site's top ten posts of 2012. Additionally, Reddit also shared some of its rather impressive vitals, not the least of which are a healthy 37 billion page views in 2012. On average, that's about 3 billion page views per month – a substantial increase over the one billion views per month we reported in February 2011.

Not only did the site manage 37 billion page views, but it also mustered a whopping 30 million posts, 260 million comments, 4 billion votes and 400 million unique visitors. Congratulations, Reddit!

Ranked by page views, here are five of Reddit's most popular posts in 2012:

  1. I am Barack Obama, President of the United States – AMA (5,598,171 page views)
  2. What's your "picture you can't see without laughing"? (2,450,140 page views )
  3. What's your favorite picture on the whole Internet? (2,148,400 page views)
  4. reddit, what do you look like before and after makeup? Is there a real difference? (2,142,071 page views)
  5. Today, a homeless looking man handed me $50 and this note. Do any of you have any idea what it means? (1,756,748 pageviews)

New this year, Reddit is also offering the "Best of 2012" hosted by an enormous multitude of subreddits, which readers can find here.

Seemingly in spite of Reddit's spartan appearance utilitarian feature set, it has managed to become one of the most popular destinations on the Internet. The site's traffic tripled in 2010, a time when once immensely popular site Digg entered its final death throes, leaving some to attribute Reddit's huge success to Digg's spectacular failure. Since then, Reddit's already enormous traffic has continued to rise, granting it the innate power to help items "go viral" and sometimes even cripple interesting websites.