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Businesses Social Networks

Reddit Files To Go Public (cnbc.com) 33

Reddit on Wednesday announced that it has confidentially submitted a draft registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission to go public. CNBC reports: The social media company did not make the filing publicly available. The company also did not say how many shares would be offered nor the price range for the proposed offering. Although Reddit was created in 2005, it has taken a unique road toward going public.

Conde Nast Publications acquired Reddit in 2006. The social media services remained a part of the publication company until it was made an independent subsidiary in 2011. Since then, it raised a series of funding rounds from venture capital firms. Most recently, the company announced that it had raised a $700 million round in August 2021 at a valuation of more than $10 billion.

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Reddit Files To Go Public

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  • What's it for? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Thursday December 16, 2021 @05:45PM (#62088629)
    Let's say it's a fine website and everything is great. But what will it productively do with $700M ?

    I can much more easily see the case for Rivian raising $10.5B. Building out to mass-manufacture trucks costs serious dough.

    But for a website? With unpaid moderators? Why?

    • Re:What's it for? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by K. S. Kyosuke ( 729550 ) on Thursday December 16, 2021 @05:52PM (#62088653)

      With unpaid moderators? Why?

      Here you have it...they don't have to pay a large portion of the people maintaining the whole thing from their ad revenue. It's like buying a factory with 80% workers working for free.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by greytree ( 7124971 )

      "What will it productively do with $700M ?"

      Fix the shitty interface ?

    • by lazarus ( 2879 )

      The money will be used to find new and profitable ways to turn the product (the users) into revenue through advertising (the client) for the benfit of the shareholders (the owners). Data mining its users will be top priority I would think. Delivering more high-value targeted ads would be a close second.

    • I wonder if I am somewhere missing the scale of companies like reddit, or twitter, or whatever. The parent comment asks

      what will it productively do with $700M ?

      This refers to the money reddit received in its most recent round of fund raising. And it's a fair question! The last publicly know headcount for reddit was 350. From that, we can follow some crude rules of thumb to come up with annual expenditures of around $50 million. So: what *are* they doing with $700 million?

      As for going public: that's just to provide the investors with a way to exit

      • Reddit basically jumped the shark after they decided they wanted to become a safe space, free of any independent thought. But it's ok, after their long slide to irrelevance, they can get bought out by Verizon and integrated into Oath, just like all of the other shitty information services that were once popular but went stale.

  • by eepok ( 545733 ) on Thursday December 16, 2021 @05:48PM (#62088643) Homepage

    I've never liked it when communication platforms go public. The push for profits is one thing, but the push from shareholders to provide unearned profits is an entirely different animal. I don't think anyone is happy with a communication platform that has taken on that toxic aspect to their business.

    • by NFN_NLN ( 633283 )

      The ultimate irony would be if /r/wallstreetbets buys up the Reddit shares and then starts dictating Reddit policies. I'd throw in a few bucks just to help the process along and be hard as a rock the whole time.

    • by kubajz ( 964091 )
      So does this mean that the current owners are now "earning" the profits, while the new shareholders who will pay dearly for their shares will not be "earning" the same profits? I am not so sure that privately owned profit-making communication platforms are so much better than publicly-owned profit-making ones...
  • by DesScorp ( 410532 ) on Thursday December 16, 2021 @06:01PM (#62088673) Journal

    So one of the worst platforms on the Internet will now be a financial drag on its investors. Because there's no way this thing is going to make enough money to cover what's being invested in it, let alone make a profit beyond that.

    • Washington Post doesn't make much profit either, but still somehow Bezos wanted to own it. Funny, that. It's almost as if they get something for owning large media companies besides a direct revenue stream.

  • Further downhill (Score:5, Interesting)

    by istartedi ( 132515 ) on Thursday December 16, 2021 @06:09PM (#62088695) Journal

    Because the old reddit that was actually worth something now defaults to a crappy re-design and is doing the same kind of rage-baiting that sites like Twitter do. The incentives to pull in more page-views and ad revs that come from being public is just what they need... to take the final plunge down the drain they've been circling for years; but not until insiders have had a nice exit.

    • > but not until insiders have had a nice exit.

      Yep, that's how I see this move - a way for the initial investors to cash out by getting amateurs to buy in.

    • OK, who is going to replace Reddit? Reddit took over Digg for many users. Why am I still on /.? :P

      • Probably something blockchain oriented that rewards you for participating, but not Bitclout. Bitclout does too much navel-gazing and the implementation sucks. They're the first mover, and probably won't win. Somebody else will come along and do it better. A culture that doesn't suck, is based on new technology that the kids are in to, and that might make them immediate money can be the new reddit. Next cycle though. I can see something like that emerging from a Crypto Winter.

  • It's been nice knowin ya Reddit. I expect in a years time it'll go the way of Digg.
  • by jmccue ( 834797 ) on Thursday December 16, 2021 @07:30PM (#62088883) Homepage
    How long before 4chan has an IPO ?
  • by takochan ( 470955 ) on Thursday December 16, 2021 @08:45PM (#62088969)

    Now the constant push to 'monetize' and 'increase value for shareholders' will crapify it, make it unusable for users (i.e. 'the product') and it will die a terrible death, or it will morph into something even more vile like Facebook.

    (is it possible to bring Usenet back? :-) )

    • by psychonaut ( 65759 ) on Friday December 17, 2021 @02:41AM (#62089567)
      Usenet never really went away; though it's not as active as it once was, the number of people using it as a discussion forum (as opposed to a file-sharing service) has been fairly stable over the past few years, and many groups are still going strong. The management board for the Big-8 hierarchy [big-8.org], which administers the network's oldest newsgroups, had been dormant for several years, but in 2020 a new team (including me) was appointed and has been very active in restoring and modernizing the shared infrastructure (documentation, moderation software, etc.) and in engaging in public outreach efforts to revitalize Usenet. You might have read about this all here on Slashdot except that the story we submitted, based on our press release [big-8.org] never made it out of the firehose.
  • ...how a pack of deep left, capitalism-hating folks can find room in their hearts to embrace such a move as "going public".

    I wonder what could motivate them to do such a thing?

  • Now Reddit is going to go downhill even faster.
    The new stuff they have added recently is shit and does nothing but slow down the site big time.
  • Couple of points on Reddit

    1. Their community is mostly toxic teens who slam one another
    2. A lot of their video content has questionable origins (copyright?) and it's cross-posted to every other sub.
    3. Do we all forget the last time just having a website could generate billions? Dot.com.bubble circa 2000's?

    Bertrand Russell said it well... “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”

Anyone who imagines that all fruits ripen at the same time as the strawberries, knows nothing about grapes. -- Philippus Paracelsus

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