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Reddit Prices IPO At $34 Per Share, the Top of the Range (techcrunch.com) 54

An anonymous reader writes: Reddit priced its stock on Wednesday at $34 a share, the top of the anticipated range, a signal that investors are excited about the company's IPO on Thursday. The social media giant raised nearly $500 million in the offering. Excluding employee stock options, the 19-year old company's valuation will start at $5.4 billion, a far cry from its last private market value of $10 billion, set in August 2021, the top of the last tech markets boom. The stock, which is the most anticipated offering of the year so far, will debut on New York Stock Exchange on Thursday with the ticker symbol "RDDT."
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Reddit Prices IPO At $34 Per Share, the Top of the Range

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  • Short? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Nephilimi ( 7599450 ) on Thursday March 21, 2024 @08:09AM (#64333213)
    Pulling in some money after being kicked off of every app I was using due to the API situation would make me happy. I'm genuinely concerned on what this is going to do to the user experience now that they are answering to investors because it's never been more clear that the users are the product.
    • Re:Short? (Score:5, Informative)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Thursday March 21, 2024 @08:21AM (#64333261)

      I'm genuinely concerned on what this is going to do to the user experience

      Reddit lost $91M last year, so the status quo isn't an option.

      They need to either get more money or shut down.

      They're projected to bring in about $750M from the IPO, which will last a while at their current burn rate.

      • to train AI models. That (besides getting some cash in so they don't collapse) is why they're doing all this.
        • The obvious connection I initially missed was rule 34. So between porn and selling users data to AI training models, is that profitable? I'm guessing still no, but yet as I write this the stock is up at $54. /walstreetbets must be interesting today, but I just can't bring myself to deal with the site without my beloved Apollo.
        • I wouldn't 100% bet on this, but I wonder if Reddit will be the needle that pierces the AI/ML/LLM hype bubble. It could become a perfect demonstration that fundamentally the results produced by these models can only be as good as the data they were trained on. Garbage in, garbage out, but more realistically if you feed them large volumes of mediocre data unsupervised then you'll get a mediocre answerbot in return. See also all the coding bots that can generate plausible code from a prompt: if you review tha

          • Have you seen how useless/unreliable Reddit commentary is? There is very little cohesive, original thought there in general. Divining the exceptions from the rule there is about more than ranking, and if the user base/quality further atrophy due to the moderation situation then it only gets worse.

            Narrow AI/ML/Expert Systems are really where the energy budget dictates viability today. That will be the situation for another 5 years minimum. After that if the progress is crazy good some of those systems might

            • Reddit's usefulness and quality varies greatly depending on which subreddits you read. The main/default ones are crowded and mostly terrible. Some of the specialist ones are actually very good and have real experts contributing. I prefer not to look too closely myself, but I've certainly heard of other niche ones about controversial or just plain nasty subjects that I'm surprised are even legal and allowed to continue at all.

              The problem is that without employing experts in each field to identify the best co

    • by ack154 ( 591432 )

      I haven't posted there or logged in since they fucked everyone with the API/third party app changes... but I got the email about them offering users access to the IPO and just laughed and hit delete. There is no way I would ever put money into that shit show. I really can't see any positives to using the site with them now having to answer to public investors. Zero.

      • At what price was your opportunity? Let's see how this goes.
        • by ack154 ( 591432 )

          Based on the FAQ I was reading it would have been at the actual IPO price (so I guess the $34/share?). The original invite was to sign up before 3/5 - which I obviously didn't do.

          The FAQ and some other detail was at: https://redditforcommunity.com... [redditforcommunity.com]

          • by mysidia ( 191772 )

            I stayed away from it, because they emailed a prospectus last minute And did not even give people a reasonable amount of time to digest those documents and properly consider the offering. Doesn't make sense to me that they had been preparing this IPO for months but Last-minute the provisioning of these crucial documents, and require people to really hurry if they wanted to fund an account in time; that rushing investment stuff is just bad news alltogether.

            If you had chosen to sign up as Interested..

      • I got the offer, too. Of course I wasn't interested, but even if I was I was ineligible because it was only available to US residents (they don't have any personal details so they can't pre-filter to US residents only). $34 still seems way over-valued to me for a company that doesn't seem to have a path to profitability.

    • it's never been more clear that the users are the product.

      It's ALWAYS been clear that the users are the product. Anyone who hasn't seen that is either blind, stupid, or in denial.

    • by dbialac ( 320955 )
      A lot of the people involved in the IPO are mods who use Reddit themselves. If they work together, they'll have an influence on the direction of the company. They'll also have an interest in making the company actually make money.
  • Reddit is a giant meme anyway, so why not?

  • Would be 5, if not for Huffman's enormous payday. Who the fuck is jumping to give Huffman's his massive payout for this turd?

    • by munehiro ( 63206 )

      can't wait to short it to death. Reddit is dead corporate approved meat. It's digg reloaded. It's just a matter of time people will leave.

  • by merde ( 464783 ) on Thursday March 21, 2024 @08:29AM (#64333291)

    Having given up on Raddit some time back, I guess this gives me one last use for it, to pick up a profit via a short.

    • by Rinnon ( 1474161 )

      Having given up on Raddit some time back, I guess this gives me one last use for it, to pick up a profit via a short.

      Best of luck, just be careful. The market is not a rational actor, and the actual underlying value of a security won't stop people from buying it up like so many empty calories.

      • by Dan667 ( 564390 )
        As much bad will as reddit has fostered I would be very surprised if the price increased. A short of reddit stock seems like it is very likely to make money.
  • Who cares (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Thursday March 21, 2024 @08:37AM (#64333315)

    They are in late-stage enshittification. Nothing to gain here and a lot to lose.

    • Re:Who cares (Score:5, Insightful)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Thursday March 21, 2024 @09:10AM (#64333403)

      They are in late-stage enshittification. Nothing to gain here and a lot to lose.

      No they aren't. They haven't even begun enshittification to the point where it is giving users pause. You clearly do not understand just how bad things can possibly get.

  • Pricing is hard - if you put it too low, you don't make as many billions. If you put it too high, you also don't make as many billions, and you look like an utter dick.

    Looks like they went with the second option.

  • by mattfosser ( 6851036 ) on Thursday March 21, 2024 @09:17AM (#64333415)
    I remeber when Reddit was good. Now it sucks. People buying this stock have no idea. I wonder how many actual users they have on the system. I bet most accounts are unactive.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    I can't see how they plan to make money. This IPO seems like a last ditch effort to keep the site running at a loss for a few more years. Ridiculous API pricing is not going to bring in enough money.

    Literally the only thing they have going for them is the fact that pretty much any topic you search has links to Reddit. They don't have a monetization infrastructure like Facebook. I can't see how they plan to massively increase revenue.

    They're basically Twitter. People use it but the site itself is on life sup

  • So if we consider rule 34 is this a clear indication on which direction Reddit is heading for profit somehow?
  • by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Thursday March 21, 2024 @09:46AM (#64333507) Homepage

    Reddit could downsize, run their service, and make a comfortable and unspectacular living. They don't need 2000 full-time employees. They need a core technical team, a small sales team, a few accountants and a couple of managers. Unfortunately, that isn't the way the VCs tick. They have to massively scale every business, because they don't want a comfortable income. They want 10-baggers, 100-baggers, wealth and riches.

    They also need an exit. In Reddit's case, that's going to be the IPO: the VCs get their money, and the public at large (whoever chooses to buy the stock) will get stuck with a company that - as currently organized - can literally never make a profit. But the fund managers don't want long-term healthy businesses either. They want quarterly numbers to go up. So they will push short-term financial goals, until their actions destroy the very company they invested in.

    I'm cynical today, but tell me I'm wrong...

    • what it takes to run a modern social media company. At least one of any size. You're under a constant attack both by hackers and by bots and trolls. Unpaid Mods can only do so much, and you're constantly having to rewrite and tweak the tools you give them. Then you've got a team of network admins in various global sites (which is still cheaper than pricey cloud services since you're just paying somebody else to do that work) and then you've got your entire sales staff, who are constantly out there pushing t
    • ... that's going to be the IPO ...

      Yes, the last few social media corporations to go public, lost a third of their share price (and thus, market capitalization) in a few weeks: Given Reddit's P&L history, this is undoubtedly, another pump-n-dump IPO.

  • Would be funny (Score:4, Insightful)

    by brickhouse98 ( 4677765 ) on Thursday March 21, 2024 @10:22AM (#64333621)
    Would be funny if all their mods downed tools the day before the IPO. Let anarchy reign.
  • Guess that's why they've been so ban happy for the last year or two.

Technology is dominated by those who manage what they do not understand.

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