Reddit made an initial public offering filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday ahead of its highly-anticipated stock market debut.
The social network plans to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “RDDT.” Its listing – expected in March – would be the largest IPO by a social media company since Pinterest went public in 2019.
How social media’s biggest user protest rocked Reddit
The number of shares to be offered and the price range for the proposed offering have not yet been determined, Reddit said in a statement.
The IPO filing revealed that Reddit sustained $90.8m in losses in 2023, as its revenue grew by roughly 21%. The business estimated that its US average revenue per user or ARPU, was $3.42 for the last quarter of 2023 – a decrease of 2% year over year…
I don’t think this is going to tank like everyone says. Those that hold that opinion are too heavily basing this on personal feelings toward the platform. Reddit isn’t geared toward those individuals anymore. They successfully pivot the platform towards the broad swath of social media users. The market will be pricing reddit based on this. Not whether or not you personally think it’s still a site worth using. The more opinionated geek crowd was never profitable and reddit inc doesn’t care about them.
At this point social media users have grown so weary of their main platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Enough to have mass adopted reddit especially during the pandemic years. Reddit has been capitalizing on that to give people something that seems fresh to them. For all your own years of baggage you personally hold over reddit, the broad market of social media users do not care. They just want their big multi-forum app to entertain them.
The market will not price reddit based on your personal idpol issues with the site. Of which everybody across the spectrum seems to have some sort of stick up their ass. Reddit has survived all those “reddit moments” over the past decades. The platform has actually proven incredibly resilient. The nature of reddit is that it isn’t any common identity anyone can point to really. There is so much representation across the board. Users hate other parts of reddit rather than reddit itself.
The big social platforms have consolidated power over the internet. There’s no competitors. reddit being the forgotten stepchild is having its time in the spotlight right now. The fediverse ecosystem is too raw and too technical for the casual user right now.
The company basically has to keep mods placated to keep on keeping the lights on. They did survive the API protest. I think to them that was actually a litmus test for the IPO. So far we have seen there is no shortage of sycophants lined up. Subreddits are valuable and there has been and will always be those who want to be internet feudal lord.
A lot of people do take issue with reddit but overall the userbase they are selling, that broad social media userbase, they did not care about such issues as the API whatever gabagool. They don’t even know what an aye pee eye is. They just wanted their app to go back to normal. And it did. And reddit resumed operation as normal.
Any success Reddit sees is just that it’s racing to the bottom slower than Meta (VR can be profitable guys) and Twitter (what’s a micro service, anyway?)
We romanticize the era when a company in a garage can take upset the big players. It’s mostly bullshit.
But when the big players and enshitifying this quickly, that’s when the garage bands eat their lunches.
I’ll have my popcorn out for this, in any case.