Reddit Files To Go Public (cnbc.com) 98
Reddit has filed its initial public offering (IPO) with the SEC on Thursday. "The company plans to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol 'RDDT,'" reports CNBC. From the report: Its market debut, expected in March, will be the first major tech initial public offering of the year. It's the first social media IPO since Pinterest went public in 2019. Reddit said it had $804 million in annual sales for 2023, up 20% from the $666.7 million it brought in the previous year, according to the filing. The social networking company's core business is reliant on online advertising sales stemming from its website and mobile app.
The company, founded in 2005 by technology entrepreneurs Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, said it has incurred net losses since its inception. It reported a net loss of $90.8 million for the year ended Dec. 31, 2023, compared with a net loss of $158.6 million the year prior. [...] Reddit said it plans to use artificial intelligence to improve its ad business and that it expects to open new revenue channels by offering tools and incentives to "drive continued creation, improvements, and commerce." It's also in the early stages of developing and monetizing a data-licensing business in which third parties would be allowed to access and search data on its platform.
For example, Google on Thursday announced an expanded partnership with Reddit that will give the search giant access to the company's data to, among other uses, train its AI models. "In January 2024, we entered into certain data licensing arrangements with an aggregate contract value of $203.0 million and terms ranging from two to three years," Reddit said, regarding its data-licensing business. "We expect a minimum of $66.4 million of revenue to be recognized during the year ending December 31, 2024 and the remaining thereafter." On Wednesday, Reddit said it plans to sell a chunk of its IPO shares to 75,000 of its most loyal users.
The company, founded in 2005 by technology entrepreneurs Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, said it has incurred net losses since its inception. It reported a net loss of $90.8 million for the year ended Dec. 31, 2023, compared with a net loss of $158.6 million the year prior. [...] Reddit said it plans to use artificial intelligence to improve its ad business and that it expects to open new revenue channels by offering tools and incentives to "drive continued creation, improvements, and commerce." It's also in the early stages of developing and monetizing a data-licensing business in which third parties would be allowed to access and search data on its platform.
For example, Google on Thursday announced an expanded partnership with Reddit that will give the search giant access to the company's data to, among other uses, train its AI models. "In January 2024, we entered into certain data licensing arrangements with an aggregate contract value of $203.0 million and terms ranging from two to three years," Reddit said, regarding its data-licensing business. "We expect a minimum of $66.4 million of revenue to be recognized during the year ending December 31, 2024 and the remaining thereafter." On Wednesday, Reddit said it plans to sell a chunk of its IPO shares to 75,000 of its most loyal users.
Re: (Score:3)
I guess its yet another ironic example of "There is NO such thing as "bad publicity" in the "free press".
So with their big Google deal (Score:2)
They're going to lose less this year. Not turn a profit, but lose less.
And people are supposed to buy shares thinking Reddit will find ways to get blood from the stone when they've already sold gravel futures?
Re: (Score:2)
Re:So with their big Google deal (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Sadly no. But someone in Vegas may be willing to take bets.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
ethtrader hates them:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtr... [reddit.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: So with their big Google deal (Score:2)
Why do it before? It'll jump $15 between the IPO and public trading
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Reddit said it had $804 million in annual sales for 2023
It reported a net loss of $90.8 million for the year ended Dec. 31, 2023
So, that would mean Reddit spent approximately $895 Million last year.
On what?
Re: (Score:2)
So, that would mean Reddit spent approximately $895 Million last year.
On what?
On really good bad publicity, apparently.
Re: (Score:1)
On what?
Server maintenance, electrical costs, a small number of employees, and LOTS of attorney fees. Between suing for some AI possibly using their data for training, drafting the API agreement, the meltdown with their moderators, and everything else to do with the IPO, the lawyers were very busy.
Re:So with their big Google deal (Score:5, Informative)
So, that would mean Reddit spent approximately $895 Million last year. On what?
The best bit of a public or IPO company is that you can actually see, they provide a summary on page 18 of the prospectus.
All numbers are thousands of USD.
Revenue $ 804,029
Cost of revenue 111,011
Research and development 438,346
Sales and marketing 230,175
General and administrative 164,658
Total costs and expenses 944,190
Income (loss) from operations (140,161)
Other income (expense), net 53,138
You can also see the impact of the moderator purge and blackout, user engagement was mostly unchanged but revenue per user dropped by 22%. The revenue per user still hasn't fully recovered.
The other income column here is worth commenting on, $53M in 2023 compared to $10M in 2022 providing them a significant 6.5% revenue bump, it cut their headline net loss figure by 1/3rd. This was caused by them investing $804M in 2022 lining up for a sale of $1.3B of securities in 2023. This seems suspicious and potentially a bit of financial manipulation to make the company figures look better at a glance.
Re: So with their big Google deal (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And thus... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:And thus... (Score:4, Insightful)
And we'll finally find out whether there is a limit to enshittification. At what point is a service SO garbage that really nobody gives a fuck about it anymore. Or is there no limit and users will swallow everything and anything?
This is the deciding moment, people. If they can get away with that, there really is no limit and they can do whatever they want with their users and the users will swallow it.
Re: (Score:2)
This is the deciding moment, people.
No. That moment was a year ago and the decision was made. We are just now realizing what the answer was: The vast majority of high-value users have left. There are bots and engagement algorithms now. There is no more room for the common person. Reddit has died and will rot.
Re: (Score:2)
>Reddit has died and will rot.
Funny, I'm still finding lots of common people in the places I visit.
Re: (Score:2)
At what point is a service SO garbage that really nobody gives a fuck about it anymore.
Well, I know what the theme of this week's episode of The Digg Reel [archive.org] is going to be!
What do you find shitty? (Score:2)
The enshittification of reddit accelerates.
In what ways to you see this?
I was pretty late to the Reddit party, really only starting using it heavily a few years ago.
To me, it's been a pretty good tool for technical groups, and also for soem groups related to video games and even books.
I was using it heavily before the whole Apollo mess, but I never used Apollo, Narwhal is working pretty well for me, so to me that seemed like a non-issue and I really didn't see that many useful people leave.
To me if there's
Re: (Score:2)
If you go to the more focused groups though, the ones that don't hit
Less general is better (Score:1)
It's definitely decreased in quality if you look at /r/all.
I guess I could agree some areas have gotten more shitty, at least those with general content - but that simply reflects peoples behaviour in the general population. Personally I almost entirely am following very specific subreddits.
The further you roam from the general areas the better Reddit gets. Reddit has I think always been most useful for long-tail content, and that's more the case than ever - but I don't really think much was lost, as what
Re: (Score:2)
Toxic waste dumpster fire (Score:3)
Reddit is renowned as a pit of the worst trolls, racists, fascists, misogynists, etc. second only to 4chan.
Now breed them together and guess what emerges. The enshittification of the Internet is a GO!!
Re: (Score:2)
Good idea, I'll wait for the 4chan IPO.
Re: (Score:2)
Google didn't start with "don't be evil". That was something silly added to an investor presentation several years after its creation and that the time it was *already* in the for profit surveillance business.
Don't be so quick to lap up every marketing catch phrase you hear.
Reddit is renowned as a pit of the worst trolls, racists, fascists, misogynists, etc. second only to 4chan.
Reddit is a big place with millions upon millions of people discussing millions of different topics. In any population that size you'll find subgroups of filth. 4chan on the other hand is a small place with thousands of the internet wors
Re: Toxic waste dumpster fire (Score:1)
IPO shares for loyal users (Score:5, Interesting)
On Wednesday, Reddit said it plans to sell a chunk of its IPO shares to 75,000 of its most loyal users.
It's been a while. I wonder what the criteria will be. Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth VA Linux went public, Slashdot was part of the IPO frenzy, and some of us got the equivalent to ~$12k worth of VA Linux shares, free to trade after 6 months. The criteria back then was that our email had to appear on a Linux kernel or widely used tool commit for the distribution VA Linux used in their systems. It wasn't life changing money, but I remember it fondly because up until then all the payment or bonuses I ever received were for closed source, commercial or enterprise software development.
It'd be interesting to see what criteria Reddit uses for their IPO shares recipients. If they go by karma alone there'll be quite a few OnlyFans content creators who'll see the green. Hopefully it's some combination of karma, actual participation, account age, etc. in addition to whatever securities laws restrictions are in place (e.g. for VA Linux all recipients had to be US-based).
Cheers!
Re: (Score:2)
You can get a lot of OF feet pics for $12k. Congrats!
As far as Reddit goes, IPOing at a loss is dirt common for tech companies, their problem being they likely don't have a path to profit so this money will just extend how long it takes for them to shrivel to nothing and get sold to BzX for a song.
Maybe they can merge user bases to stir up some more ad sales.
Re:IPO shares for loyal users (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe Slashdot will go public someday and reward us low-UID users with shares! We'll be able to buy all the hot grits, Beowulf clusters, and neck beard care supplies we can imagine! Maybe then they'll also hire someone to add Unicode support, post-submit comment editing, and start checking article submissions for dupes. Okay, okay, I was just kidding with that last sentence.
Re:IPO shares for loyal users (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe Slashdot will go public someday and reward us low-UID users with shares! We'll be able to buy all the hot grits, Beowulf clusters, and neck beard care supplies we can imagine! Maybe then they'll also hire someone to add Unicode support, post-submit comment editing, and start checking article submissions for dupes. Okay, okay, I was just kidding with that last sentence.
I think the SourceForge acquisition was the closest riff to an IPO ever had. The numbers were never high enough or compelling enough for Slashdot to IPO. The D ice, B IZ X, and Stac k Exch a nge acquisitions seem to be the only financial action Slashdot will ever see.
Edit: The correct spellings of one or more of the entities above triggered the lameness filter -- I guess some topics shall not be discussed on /. Wondering how long this post will be up after I press Submit...
It'll be interesting to witness what happens to Reddit after IPO. I suspect this might be an IPO engineered for the investors to cash out as much as possible, and we'll see a return to private ownership and all outstanding shares bought by some entity within 3-5 years. Maybe as part of Springer or some other media conglomerate.
Cheers!
Re: (Score:3)
I expect that like /., anyone who buys into this Reddit thing is dumping good money after bad. The site's in existence for 16 years or so now, never has made money, and has lost significant goodwill over the last couple of years. Nothing they are doing to turn a profit is going to change that decline, which promises reduced usage. This tracks closely with the /. situation, though the loss of goodwill was about 12 years ago in this case.
I imagine that Taco could have figured out how to break even with thi
Re: (Score:2)
No one was ever willing to do actual work to make this site not stupid. The editors never edited, the programmers never programmed. Dupes, unicode.
As such paying a subscription was signaling that you were happy with low-effort bullshit.
Reddit attracted away the userbase with relative competence. Now they shall enshittify to the max in the usual style of publicly traded corporations and some other place will get their users. But by then this site will have been given up to the white supremacists and AGW deni
Re: IPO shares for loyal users (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
That's an interesting take on the Venn diagram, and not the type of comment I usually see on this site.
That's because most people still here and capable of assembling a cogent sentence care about whether they get kicked off, but all I care about now is that if I go, I go in a blaze of glory. More than half of the comments on this site are now from the pointy hood set. They can not tell you fast enough how they want everyone different from them to die in a ditch.
Re: (Score:2)
There are other kinds?
Re: (Score:2)
> It'll be interesting to witness what happens to Reddit after IPO
Easy - same as pretty much every other IPO. First, the hypetrain will roll in to town, and they'll look sort of good for a while, mainly while the dark money gets its massive payouts. As that money moves out, the stock price will crash, as even the strongest-stomached users get fed up of the enshitification.
A few years later, someone will buy it for maybe a 10th of the IPO price, will promise to bring it back to former glories, will largel
Re: (Score:2)
Wasn't it the VA Linux acquisition? Or did VA own SF back in the day?
Re: (Score:2)
. Okay, okay, I was just kidding with that last sentence.
phew!... I'm glad the grits, clusters, and neck beard supplies on still on the table.
Re:IPO shares for loyal users (Score:4, Funny)
Great idea; no notes.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It'd be interesting to see what criteria Reddit uses for their IPO shares recipients.
i'm thinking those mods or top rated contributors who stayed in spite of the fallout of their last monumental api-prices fuck-up. after all they do produce/encourage most of the content they are trying to sell to ai-trainers.
then again, besides that being just empty ceo talk, if that's actually a viable business model (unlike their ad scheme which has very obviously failed seeing the figures) is anybody's guess.
mine is that they are preparing to pack up. that corpus of data needs to be fed to stay relevant
Reddit is a cesspool. (Score:1)
Karma? Longevity? Whatever.
Reddit is a cesspool, and while it's "nice" they'll be rewarding almost nobody with the "opportunity" to BUY REDDIT STOCK it's still a scam move.
Don't do it. It's not an investment. It's a gamble. Whether you think you're super-duper-special because you posted on Reddit/Karma/age/whatever it's still a gamble. Reddit has no value. You're just betting on tmorrow's idiot offering more than what you're willing to pay tomorrow.
F Reddit.
Re: (Score:2)
It really depends on the resale conditions of those IPO shares. If you can sell at any time, then, sign me up for this "scam move"!
70 million daily active users (Score:2)
70 million daily active users and they can't make a proft.
Well, you might assume they could if they rearranged their buisness to be less about growth and fired most people working on it, which is what twitter did, except that twitter is losing a ton of money right now and lost like 20% of users in a year by some counts.
Somehow facebook does make a lot of profit though, so there is a way for social media to rake in the cash. Seems like a risky bet though. Facebook says it makes about $ 38 per user per year s
Re: (Score:2)
I'm fairly sure most of Facebook's money is from selling the privacy of their users. That's kinda hard to do if you don't have it.
Re: (Score:2)
The ads Facebook shows me are almost always something I'm interested in. I don't think I've ever seen an ad on Reddit that interested me in the slightest. They should be able to figure out my interests based on what I read on their site, but for some reason they haven't figured out how to do that in 16 years.
Re: (Score:2)
I highly doubt that, what I see on Facebook is a ton of paid and unpaid content posted by fake news organizations and gullible people re-sharing that drivel.
Re: 70 million daily active users (Score:1)
Twitter after all these years is finally getting close to being profitable. They had 3.4B in revenue last year and rising the cost of running it is $2B although they are saddled with debt from the previous owners which servicing that debt costs another $1B.
As for users:
2020: 347m
2021: 362m
2022: 401m
2023: 540m
Re: (Score:2)
>Well, you might assume they could if they rearranged their buisness to be less about growth and fired most people working on it, which is what twitter did, except that twitter is losing a ton of money right now and lost like 20% of users in a year by some counts.
You really can't compare any other company to twitter. The fact that they are losing tons of money has an entirely singular cause. So, they could shift some of the $440M they spent in R&D, or the $160M operating costs and be profitable. Or
...They did what now? (Score:1)
Re: ...They did what now? (Score:1)
People are seriously underestimating the AI data (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't see many predictions it will go up in price.
But Reddit is an absolutely massive trove of data about nearly any subject you could care to name, from the most technical to the most risqué. Probably about as big as any other social media store, bigger than most.
I personally plan to buy shares at IPO (well maybe a week after to let it settle). I am an active user there but seriously doubt I'd be part of the 75k group, I don't think I've been using the site as long as many people have.
By all rights Reddit should be a bigger property than Meta, especially because they are not throwing their money down a hole building out a Metaverse no-one wants... just a giant site with all kind of juicy scrapeable AI training data.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Facebook's big share price recovery lately was largely because they sharply reduced investment in the Metaverse.
They haven't. At the last earnings call Zuckerberg said they were still all in on VR, and plan to keep investing just as much in 2024 as in 2023. And I know big numbers are scary, but they are investing less than 10% in revenue all while delivering a very healthy earnings per share not out of line with literally anyone else in the tech industry.
Their price recovery was largely based on them also jumping into the AI world, and otherwise their share prices has followed the rest of the tech industry dropping t
Re: (Score:2)
Enough to build 565 of the F35 fighter jet. And where did it go?
Re: (Score:2)
$46.6B in total as of last October. Enough to build 565 of the F35 fighter jet. And where did it go?
Would you prefer that Facebook spend money on an air force? That's a scary thought... Personally, I'd rather they flush the money down a toilet.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Reddit is mostly a cesspool of opinions, full of half-baked delusions by nutters of various flavors. Unfortunately it also contains the occasional morsel of insight, so you can't even use it as the negative counterpoint to anything you want to teach your AI (i.e. "learn that everything you read there is garbage" also doesn't work).
That kind of information is utterly worthless for training an AI. It's like trying to figure out what's going on in the USSR by reading Pravda. That also contained just enough tru
This is the droid they are looking for. (Score:4, Informative)
Reddit is mostly a cesspool of opinions, full of half-baked delusions by nutters of various flavors.
Yes but this is exactly the kind of material that AI firms crave as a basis. :-)
But seriously Reddit is an extremely well *segmented* cesspool! So you can easily pick and choose what to ingest, on any topic, for any purpose. There are plenty of subreddits that mostly lack delusion, many technical subreddits are pretty good for example.
Re: (Score:2)
Technical subreddits lack delusion? You have no idea.
The reality distortion field of religious nutters is only rivaled by that of the fanboys of some particular brand or technology.
Re: (Score:1)
The reality distortion field of religious nutters is only rivaled by that of the fanboys of some particular brand or technology.
I said technical forums, not consumer brand forums.
However I totally agree that technical brand zealotry can be on par with religion, honestly even exceeding - but that is exactly the kind of thinking many AI makers look to tap into to build a more persuasive AI for whatever social goals the AI builders have set for themselves.
So again, gold mine of real-world human zealot data!
My
Re: This is the droid they are looking for. (Score:1)
The difference between technical and brand is small, go to any AMD or Wayland forum to find out. Hell, you can get banned from the Wayland forums for even suggesting running Wayland on Xorg (the way it should be done with the current state).
Re: (Score:2)
Reddit is an absolutely massive trove of data about nearly any subject you could care to name, from the most technical to the most risqué.
The issue is, Reddit's data trove needs a significant amount of human filtering to find out what is right and wrong. There's no technical reddit post on any subject which doesn't have some incorrect garbage in the replies. Letting a machine sort through that would be interesting in all the wrong ways.
By all rights Reddit should be a bigger property than Meta, especially because they are not throwing their money down a hole building out a Metaverse no-one wants...
Meta isn't throwing any money down a hole. They are investing a small portion of their earnings - not out of line with any other tech company's R&D per earning investment budget - into a market which *check
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I personally plan to buy shares at IPO (well maybe a week after to let it settle).
You call it participating in the Stock Market. I call it gambling. We are not the same.
Re: (Score:1)
You call it participating in the Stock Market. I call it gambling. We are not the same.
Oh I agree it is straight up gambling. We are exactly the same. :-)
Well except for my participating in the gambling and you declining to throw money into a rigged casino.
Reddit is a dumpster fire (Score:4, Insightful)
I wonder if those who are going to buy into this dumpster fire of a social media site understand what they're getting into.
Jump on Reddit and say ANYTHING that doesn't jive with the hive-mind-group-think-echo-chamber of any given sub-reddit and they will absolutely carpet bomb your karma back to the Stone Age. Or they'll insta-ban your account from posting in their sub-reddit. Or both :|
Go point out something negative about their favorite celebrity, politician or political team and watch as the hive-mind issues a call to arms.
Opinions are absolutely allowed over there as long as your opinion is in line with their opinion. If you dare to think differently, avoid Reddit at all costs.
That place makes Slashdot look amazing . . . . . lol
Re:Reddit is a dumpster fire (Score:4, Insightful)
Circa 2005 Slashdot was amazing. This is a fossil.
Re:Reddit is a dumpster fire (Score:4, Informative)
Nah, Slashdot in 2024 is still pretty amazing I’ve been here since 1998...
Re:Reddit is a dumpster fire (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a fossil. Interesting people stopped in every day or so and posted something intriguing. The stories were on point. There was constant work being done on the code base. CowboyNeal was an option on the polls. The journal system was in use. I mean sure, we can post like it was back then, but it's not like that anymore. Half the features are broken.
If it's a fossil, then why... (Score:2)
Then why did someone w/ a 4-digit UID make an insightful post about him receiving $15K for his work on VA Linux from back in the day? And why did someone else mod him up for it?
There's still a decent amount of knowledge that's circulated everyday on Slashdot to make it worth visiting for me. It's certainly not nearly as strong as it was back in its prime in the aughts. But I continue to learn things each day with each visit, and so I continue to do so.
Re: (Score:2)
I used to feel that way. Most articles result in some political bullshit nowadays. Used to be someone with half a brain would explain something I didn't know. That is rare.
I had them delete my low uid. It seemed pointless, things got a little better here but it's not what you are describing.
Re: (Score:2)
Most articles result in some political bullshit nowadays
Because everything is politicized these days..
Someone could say "Water is wet", and it would get turned into political bullshit.
Re: (Score:2)
It's not an investment (Score:1)
If you want to invest in something, find something of value and buy into it.
Buying something today hoping someone else will buy it from you for more tomorrow is not an investment. It's a gamble.
Anything you do with cryptocurrency or reddit is not an investment. It's a gamble.
And (Score:2)
Wall Street shovels industrial-strength laxatives into the asshole of the Internet.
incurred net losses since its inception, go IPO (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
They go IPO to transfer their losses to to other investors. Those are known as "marks" or "suckers", depending on who you ask.
If it was profitable or had a chance to become profitable soon, they wouldn't be sharing any control of either the company, or the profits. They'd just borrow the money and pay it back later.
But it could be that no bank is going to lend them any money. That's a warning sign I actively look out for when crowdfunding stuff: could they have done this through a bank, but did not? Then t
Reddit founded by Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
ambiguous (Score:2)
Are Reddit's files going to be made public?
So long.... (Score:2)
Guess its time to start looking for alternatives.