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Reddit Is Profitable For the First Time Ever (theverge.com) 103

Posted by BeauHD from the would-you-look-at-that dept.
In Reddit's third-quarter earnings results, the company reported a profit of $29.9 million, with $348.4 million in revenue -- a 68% increase year over year. The Verge reports: The company hasn't been profitable at any point in its nearly 20-year history. Since going public, Reddit lost $575 million during its first quarter on the market, but it decreased that loss to $10 million last quarter, and is now finally in the green. Reddit also grew to 97.2 million daily users over the past few months, marking a 47 percent increase from the same time last year. That number exceeded 100 million users on some days during the quarter, Reddit says.

Reddit's advertising revenue grew to $315.1 million, while "other" revenue reached $33.2 million on account of "data licensing agreements signed earlier this year." Both Google and OpenAI have cut deals with Reddit to train their AI models on its posts.
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Reddit Is Profitable For the First Time Ever More

Reddit Is Profitable For the First Time Ever

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  • We did it reddit!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      No, no we didn't, reddit is a classist scam that is ripping off people by selling influence and censoring users, Reddit is corrupt and abusive and the evil people in charge are all on their way to hell from what I can see.

      • Welcome to the corporate economy, Pal!

        But really any chat forum eventually becomes what you just described.

        • But forums are usually independent of each other. In the case of reddit, they are all under one company's control.
          Whether it's done by Meta, Reddit or X, centralized control of discussions is not a positive. I much prefer independent forums.

  • Fuck /u/spez (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    n/t

  • Unfortunately, unless you want cat videos and other ephemera, Reddit is not what it once was.

    Maybe this is because many of the moderators left or, essentially, internet communities tend towards entropy.

    • Re:Profit beats quality (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Malay2bowman ( 10422660 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2024 @05:42AM (#64905599)
      "Unfortunately, unless you want cat videos and other ephemera, Reddit is not what it once was." You might be using a different Reddit than I am, but I usually search for topics of interest externally (not using Reddit's search but using a web search engine with reddit or site:reddit.com as one of the search words.) The only annoyance I have with it is how quickly some of the discussions become "archived".

      • Agreed - using a search engine improves the signal to noise ratio for targetted consumption (i.e. reading about a specific thing).

        Reddit, on its own, tends towards noise in some subs of interest to me (accepting this is a self-selected sample). This untargeted consumption (i.e. scrolling through a sub) is often not what is once was.

        Reddit was designed for consumption related to ones interests - i.e. untargeted consumption within your choice of subs.

      • You might be using a different Reddit than I am, but I usually search for topics of interest externally (not using Reddit's search but using a web search engine with reddit or site:reddit.com as one of the search words.)

        Using site:reddit.com in a query on most web search engines stopped working in July 2024. That's when Reddit started using robots.txt to block indexing [slashdot.org] by DuckDuckGo and other web search engines that don't pay Reddit a royalty for the privilege to index Reddit. This royalty, as I understand it, is what the summary refers to by "'other' revenue reached $33.2 million".

    • 'â¦.tend towards entropy.' -- please don't use scientific terminology here, you are confusing the readers. Thank you

    • Unfortunately, unless you want cat videos and other ephemera, Reddit is not what it once was.

      Maybe this is because many of the moderators left or, essentially, internet communities tend towards entropy.

      Funny how all these people claimed to have left and then total number of users increased. Has the profit motive caused them to start spinning up spambots? If so? How would we know the difference between them an actual humans posting nonsense?

    • Unfortunately, unless you want cat videos and other ephemera, Reddit is not what it once was.

      Maybe this is because many of the moderators left or, essentially, internet communities tend towards entropy.

      Reddit is basically politics and porn now.

    • I want the cat videos. Can't get em. Its just page after page of the same boring political memes, NPC replies, and links to paywalled news.

    • Maybe it's like that in your hentai community. But to most people Reddit is the same as it always was.

  • "and is now finally in the green." (Score:5, Informative)

    by LondoMollari ( 172563 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2024 @05:29AM (#64905587) Homepage

    Should be:
    "and is now finally in the black."
    If using proper accounting terms.

  • Once again showing (Score:1, Interesting)

    by thegarbz ( 1787294 )

    That Slashdotters have precisely zero business sense. Just like the claims that Reddit will go bankrupt after what they did a few years back. Or the claims that Netflix will lose all its subscribers, or the claims that Meta can't keep spending money on VR, or that Uber will cease to exist, or that Tesla can't afford to make EVs, etc. etc.

    Slashdotters are effectively the tech world equivalent of Jim Cramer when it comes to understanding business. They make a lot of noise, and usually the exact opposite of wh

    • Re:Once again showing (Score:5, Insightful)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Wednesday October 30, 2024 @06:23AM (#64905673) Homepage Journal

      Slashdotters have precisely zero business sense

      Slashdotters haven't had one unified opinion on any of those things, ever.

      • Re:Once again showing (Score:5, Funny)

        by JamesTRexx ( 675890 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2024 @08:43AM (#64905981) Journal

        Slashdotters haven't had one unified opinion on any of those things, ever.

        Well, we're all with you on that.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mjwx ( 966435 )

        Slashdotters have precisely zero business sense

        Slashdotters haven't had one unified opinion on any of those things, ever.

        Pretty sure if Slashdot had one member left, he'd still start an argument.

      • The loudest people here though are all the same person (or at least act like a unitary far-left hive mind) - and their army of bots votes everyone with alternative viewpoints down.

        • You don't have to tell me, they mod me down constantly for expressing liberal views and sharing well-established facts about conservatives, crony corporatism...

          Or is that not what you meant?

          • Yes, it is all Elon's slashdot stalker-bot army who follow you to the ends of the internet to personally give you a bad time. He wrote the code himself and calls it "drinkypoo stalker bot". It's been in beta for 12 years but he'll push the release code right after he sets foot on Mars.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by guruevi ( 827432 )

            It is actually you and your aliases such as AmiMojo, rsilvergun, gweihir etc and I see that out of the last two pages of your post, 1 got downvoted to 0, the rest is 1 or higher, I have paged through a few of your posts and see nothing even at -1.

            • It is actually you and your aliases such as AmiMojo, rsilvergun, gweihir etc

              As far as I know, all of those people are uniques, but I haven't met any of them. I can however assure you that I am not any of them. I have only ever had one other account here, I cannot remember what the UID or nickname was, and I certainly do not have access to the email address (or even remember which one I was using then) in order to recover it. Wish I did though, I believe it had one less digit and less poo.

              I see that out of the last two pages of your post, 1 got downvoted to 0, the rest is 1 or higher, I have paged through a few of your posts and see nothing even at -1.

              Some days are less contentious than others. I am usually bouncing off the top of the karma kap

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by tepples ( 727027 )

              Or maybe they're all aliases of twitter [slashdot.org]. Didn't Elon Musk buy that account?

      • Slashdotters haven't had one unified opinion on any of those things, ever.

        I do!

      • Slashdotters haven't had one unified opinion on any of those things, ever.

        Well no not a unified opinion, but certainly a popular opinion as demonstrated by moderation and the discussions. And those things I list are definitely the popular opinion. The reality is a large portion of the Slashdot is definitely a form of group think, which is to be expected, the population here are all bent in a certain direction by nature of the content carried by the site. It's just that this population largely doesn't understand businesses very well.

        Oh I heard from Slashdot that Spotify dide when

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by bsolar ( 1176767 )

      That Slashdotters have precisely zero business sense. Just like the claims that Reddit will go bankrupt after what they did a few years back.

      The claims were mainly that the decisions would impact the creation of new content. It's entirely possible the decisions led to a short-term profit but jeopardized the company's future prospects (assuming it had any...).

      Depending on your understanding of "business sense" that might be good or bad: after all many only really care about the short-term profits.

      • It's entirely possible the decisions led to a short-term profit but jeopardized the company's future prospects

        The death of a company doesn't have to be sudden and spectacular, like an Enron. Many of them take years or even decades to accomplish, like a Kodak.

        Think of Reddit like a company who owned some land with oil beneath it. They weren't an oil company themselves, so one day, they decided to sell their valuable plot of land to an oil company to mine it. Wonderful decision in the moment, because now t

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Junta ( 36770 )

      Don't know if it's lack of business sense or wishful thinking, that these moves in a rational world should face backlash from customers as they are against the best interests of the user base. That a user base would protect their self interests and reward alternatives that treat them better. Perhaps remembering that is pretty much how the tech industry generally played out back in the 80s-90s. The user base was comprised of significantly more particularly invested individuals. Now with that slice of the

    • If a business has been operating for nearly 20 years and never made a year on year profit, It's not a viable business. If it's been propped up that long I would refer to it as a successful charity. The money that props up Reddit is donated to forward certain political and social agendas.

    • > Slashdotters are effectively the tech world equivalent of Jim Cramer when it comes to understanding business

      Lol, too true. If I want to know anything about business, especially tech, the opposite of the slashdot gestalt is usually the right answer. Try to provide facts, URLs, logic, history, math or anything else that goes against that narrative and get instantly modded to -1 troll.

      Works every time.

  • So it's still in the hole... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bsdetector101 ( 6345122 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2024 @05:45AM (#64905607)
    20 years in the red, losing $$, how did it survive ??? Reddit lost $575 million during its first quarter on the market, finally made $29.9 million, so it's still lost $545.1 million just from then and not counting all lost since then !!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ormy ( 1430821 )
      You forgot the $10M they lost last quarter, but yes still $555M down overall. A half-billion-dollar hole for a company whose revenue is less than $350M, nevermind profits, is a pretty bad position to be in.

    • 20 years in the red, losing $$, how did it survive ???

      The simplest answer is, it probably shouldn’t have.

      But one can make that ‘simple” argument about billions in valuation in the market. Snapchat filed in their IPO practically bragging about how they’ve never made money. Was losing 500 million a year. What was the stock market response? A valuation north of 20 billion. Where are they today? Well:

      Snapchat has not recorded an annual profit, it made a net loss of $1.3 billion in 2023

      And people still wonder why stock market crashes are inevitable.

    • Follow the money.

      Allegedly intelligence cut-outs filtered through VC's.

      In exchange for a surveillance/censorship version of Usenet.

      It's just what always happens with centralized services.

    • 20 years in the red, losing $$, how did it survive ??? Reddit lost $575 million during its first quarter on the market, finally made $29.9 million, so it's still lost $545.1 million just from then and not counting all lost since then !!

      Investors. Reddit has been one of the biggest sites with an engaged user base for almost two decades. Do you really think there's was no potential for a profitable business?

      The investor driven economy is screwy in a lot of ways, but letting a currently unprofitable business grow and continue to operate until it starts making money isn't one of them.

  • Product (Score:3)

    by Meneth ( 872868 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2024 @05:55AM (#64905627)
    "its posts", they say. Rarely has it been more clear that we're the product, not the customer.
    • Who's paying whom?

    • Rarely has it been more clear that we're the product, not the customer.

      Rarely has it been more clear that you don't understand that you are both. You are served by reddit comments, that's why you're there. You're not there because of your innate desire to feed Google's AI algorithm or to read the ads.

      The "you are product" meme perpetuates the low IQ all or nothing thinking that fundamentally is the problem in society today. You're one or the other, you need to be labelled, it's impossible for people to comprehend anything beyond a binary assignment.

      "Oh but they don't care abou

  • Wonder what will happen when the AI bubble bursts and they find many users and mods are not there anymore.

    • half of the comments are already from bots, when this will reach I dunno a critical mass like 80 or 90%, the site will just die...

  • They mention advertising growing... sure, it is slightly better than last year but advertising didn't grow that much

    The big reason they are profitable is they now have $31 million dollars more from data to train models

  • Here. Have a little side dish of Facism to go with your profit.

    https://thefederalist.com/2024... [thefederalist.com]

    • Wouldn't surprise me if that was where the extra money came from.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sosume ( 680416 )

        Why would the Democrats need to control the narrative on Reddit? Was it too much to the left?

        • Due to Reddit's structure, political leanings vary. However, the right generally feels less welcome there since it's right-leaning posters who typically are the ones posting hate speech that threatens the business and get entire subreddits banned. Them and the child porn posters.

          The worst of them occasionally move to a more right-friendly site, but they don't have the visibility there and they really want to dominate the popular sites.

  • Killed off the decentralized forum ecosystem and centralizing folk knowledge in a highly enshittified repository, while shrinking the overton window. Google will probably buy Reddit eventually as 90% of its search results come from it and then 2 years later put it on killedbygoogle.com like they did with Usenet.
  • Did Reddit numbers get goosed by making a deal to sell (your) asinine banter posted at Reddit?
    Didn't they make a deal with OpenAI this summer?
  • on other website forums and when you open them it takes you to reddit but they want you to either login or create a reddit account, i don't have a reddit account and am not interested in making one, i had one about 10 years ago and they locked it because my politics did not lean far enough to the left for them, so reddit can FOAD for all i care

  • I mean - great deal for Reddit, but paying them to train AI off their message posts? Ooof.... that's a scary thought!

    Seriously, I find specific subreddits VERY useful for getting current information on tech topics, and others handy for specific "how to" knowledge. (EG. You want to know what is working best to eradicate termites in a certain region or what deck/porch paints are holding up the best in icy winter weather? The right Reddit groups have your answers.) But you almost can't follow a single messag

  • I'm here to shill for https://lemmy.world/ [lemmy.world] again. It's pretty great, you should check it out. It's defederated Reddit, I left when Reddit broke my mobile app with their API nonsense. Lemmy is filled with Linux users and a much higher signal to noise ratio since it's not the Mcdonalds of social media. It's easy to use and being a little less popular means you don't doom scroll all day on it :)

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