The milestone timeline is oddly underwhelming. Both it and the letter from Steve Huffman emphasize the /r/WallStreetBets frenzy as evidence of Reddit popularity, which is ironic because a) it died out as quickly as it rose, as noted in Risk Factors and b) reminding the SEC that your platform was used for market manipulation in your S-1 is kinda funny.
Funniest line:
> Revenue from Reddit Gold and Collectible Avatars was not material for the years ended December 31, 2022 and 2023.
WSB has more actual discussion, while people mostly see /r/pics on their feed (because it's a default subreddit) or scroll through really quickly (because it's easily-consumable content).
Those numbers are inflated. I modded a smaller sub than WSB (still in the millions), went private during the API protests, and it consistently showed hundreds of CCUs when I was tooling with the sub.
For a company that produced negative income, absolutely absurd. Why do investors put up with this? Is there truly no oversight? There is no way he provides value close to his compensation.
He is the co-founder, and he kept the company moving after a huge backlash against the previous CEO. He made some controversial (and bold) decisions like increasing the API price to block out third-party apps, but it seems to work? So yes, he somewhat deserves that compensation.
They could have paid me $10m, given everyone a $50k bonus for the crap, and been profitable.
CEO remuneration is out of control when somebody can perform such a beige list of acts and be treated like the Messiah. Mozilla is in the same boat. Such poor value for money.
It is ridiculous, but devil's advocate: let's say the board told you that you needed to make very unpopular decisions and will be hated by millions of people for the favor.
"Participating in Reddit’s Initial Public Offering (IPO)
from reddit
sent 11 minutes ago
Hello,
TL;DR: – you’re invited to a special program that lets redditors purchase stock at the same price as institutional investors when we IPO. Details about eligibility and next steps follow. This (long, dense) message has all the info we can provide due to legal restrictions.
As you may have heard, Reddit has taken steps toward becoming a publicly traded company with the initial public filing of our registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on February 22, 2024. Yes, it’s happening.
And because you have helped make Reddit what it is today, you now have the opportunity to become Reddit owners at the same price as institutional investors.
We’re offering a Directed Share Program (“DSP”) that invites eligible users and moderators who have contributed to Reddit to participate in our initial public offering (“IPO”). (Including you!)"
It looks like DAUq was flat or declining until Q3'21, then started ticking up, but really popped off in Q3 and Q4 of 2023 after they killed third-party clients.
Yeah, they say as much in the risk factors when discussing potential issues with their metrics:
"Moreover, a single person or organization may hold multiple accounts and may use more than one account to perform multiple views within a relevant period."
I built it, and it's sort of more like HN or old.reddit.com and has image/video embeds and a lot more...except it also has the chicken and the egg problem : )
I was expecting this to be thin but not that thin.
They list three pillars for financial. 1) Ads - which they've already done so priced in 2) Data - like the google deal they announced today with google for 60m. 3) User economy that includes "Commerce ecosystem" and brace yourself:
>Reddit Avatars as non-fungible tokens on the blockchain;
That really looks like an all-or-nothing bet on their dataset being valuable for AI and multiple recurring deals like google's resulting. It's certainly big & of reasonable quality, but at a minimum you'd need a way to neutralize the fact that most reddit interactions are antagonistic - users arguing & correcting each other...not necessarily traits you want a bot to learn
> Our approach to content moderation inherently subjects us to numerous risks, including that we may: [...] be unable to retain a sufficient number of volunteer moderators
> Communities are created and led by Redditors who we call moderators, volunteers who are motivated by their passion for a given topic or idea. Moderators are not employees of Reddit.
Expect them to announce accounts requiring email/ phone associated with it and non-signed-in users having limited viewing capabilities. Also bye-bye old(.)reddit(.)com
“Similar to how cities are made from cement and steel, but are really built by their citizens, Reddit is made from code and algorithms, but is really built by our users”
“We see a spirit of entrepreneurship among Redditors, who are constantly pushing the boundaries of what Reddit can be used for. To support their creativity, we are developing new ways to earn money on Reddit. We have enabled artistic users to earn millions creating avatars”
As long as they’re not using third party apps and clicking multiple times per thread to expand the comments section by 3 new comments with a potential break for ads.
Funniest line:
> Revenue from Reddit Gold and Collectible Avatars was not material for the years ended December 31, 2022 and 2023.