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…
Cool.
Let the short selling begin.
The IPO filing revealed that Reddit sustained $90.8m in losses in 2023
Holy cow that’s a LOT of losses! We’ll need to find a new way to refer to Reddit from now to reflect that… perhaps something… familiar?
Read they paid spez over twice what they lost, so I’m gonna say they did it to themselves.
Yup. And look how much the CEOs of like Alphabet, Apple, Meta, etc. are making by comparison. Although most of it is stock so… this sounds like literal fraud then, meant to make the company look far more “profitable” than it actually is (though ianal). Wouldn’t it be funny if he went to jail? :-P (haha j/k, rich people don’t go to jail, nor suffer consequences of any kind:-|)
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.
They just sent out the emails for offering their 75k most valuable users advanced purchase. It’s based on your total karma and/or your total moderator actions. It’s that latter where I think they’re really going to get fucked. Volunteer labour is such a massive part of reddit not immediately being consumed by redditors and bots. If I took on a dozen moderators for a smallish subreddit like /r/snackexchange, maybe one of them would stick around past a month. Of those who did they either treat it like a 24/7 on-call job or they do advanced labour like programming 3rd-party tools. It’s absolutely terrible work and the only reward for it is more work, now with extra enshittification from investor pressure.
Lose those mods and it’s a doom spiral for the entire website. What’s the Plan B? Hundreds of paid customer service agents doing that work or trying to do the mod coups that failed last year because the new guy sees he’s being fucked just as hard as the old guy? Organic user traffic is going to plummet once that quality filter is gone and they see the
version of the front page. The next wave of admin crackdown to enforce investor demands is going to provoke another mod strike and compounded with the stock price falling I think reddit might be going the way of Digg very fast.edit: Also, the top tier for moderators is 5k actions. The loyalty of someone willing to do 5k un-fun things is now dependent on the value of a stock for a company that can’t turn a profit, and they can’t turn a profit without making things massively worse for the person willing to do 5k acts of labour for them. There is no way to make any of those 5k acts of labour fun and any attempt to short of being paid is a pizza party NFT which will only piss them off more.
I don’t understand how this part is actually legal. My Reddit user received a PM from official reddit account with the following:
spoiler
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!)
###Program Requirements
While being selected to pre-register is the first step, there are certain legal and regulatory requirements to participate in the DSP that are outside of Reddit’s control. Bear with us here…
To be eligible for the DSP, you must:
- Be a current U.S. resident;
- You will be asked to provide the DSP Administrator a valid social security or permanent resident number, along with other personal information. Reddit will not have access to this data.
- Please note that U.S. residents using a VPN may face application limitations if the VPN locates them in certain non-U.S. jurisdictions.
- Be at least 18 years old;
- Provide your full legal name and an email address;
- Not be a current or former Reddit employee (FTE).
When the DSP launches (a few weeks after pre-registration ends), individuals who have been confirmed for the program will be contacted by our external DSP Administrator. You will then be asked to provide additional information securely to the DSP Administrator to confirm your eligibility.
###How to pre-register
The number of people who can participate in the DSP is limited; we will offer this opportunity to as many redditors as we are able to accommodate. If capacity is reached before the deadline, you will be added to the waitlist. Based on demand, we may also limit the number of shares available.
If you are interested in being part of Reddit’s DSP, please go to https://reddit.com/dsp on desktop to complete the pre-registration form. If you are one of the confirmed participants, we will follow up with an email with more details in the coming weeks. You can also refer to the Frequently Asked Questions for more information. Due to regulatory restrictions (yeah… we know…), we are not able to respond to further inquiries or questions.
Pre-registering does not guarantee that you will be invited or able to participate in the DSP; it also does not obligate you to purchase shares.
As with any investment opportunity, you should make an individual decision based on your own personal circumstances and risk tolerance. Therefore, we urge you to review the preliminary prospectus, when available, before deciding whether to invest in Reddit.
The deadline for pre-registering for the DSP is March 5, 2024. If capacity is reached before the deadline, you will be added to the waitlist.
###What happens next?
While there won’t be a confirmation email immediately after you pre-register, everyone who pre-registers will receive an email in the coming weeks from “noreply@redditmail.com” telling them whether they can proceed with the next steps for the DSP.
This is an automated message (beep, boop, beep) and does not receive replies. Please refer to the FAQ for more information. Per our lawyercats, we are not able to respond to further inquiries or questions.
Prospectus and Important Disclosures
The offering will be made only by means of a prospectus. When available, a copy of the preliminary prospectus related to the offering may be obtained from: Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC, Prospectus Department, 180 Varick Street, New York, New York 10014, or email: prospectus@morganstanley.com; Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC, Attention: Prospectus Department, 200 West Street, New York, New York 10282, telephone: 1-866-471-2526, facsimile: 212-902-9316, or email: prospectus-ny@ny.email.gs.com; J.P. Morgan Securities LLC, Attention:c/o Broadridge Financial Solutions, 1155 Long Island Avenue, Edgewood, New York 11717, telephone: 1-866-803-9204, or email: prospectus-eq_fi@jpmorgan.com; and BofA Securities, Inc., NC1-022-02-25, 201 North Tryon Street, Charlotte, North Carolina 28255-0001, Attention: Prospectus Department, telephone: 1-800-294-1322, or email: dg.prospectus_requests@bofa.com.
A registration statement relating to these securities has been filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission but has not yet become effective. These securities may not be sold nor may offers to buy be accepted prior to the time the registration statement becomes effective. This notification shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy these securities, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation, or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction.
No offer to buy the securities can be accepted and no part of the purchase price can be received until the registration statement has become effective, and any such offer may be withdrawn or revoked, without obligation or commitment of any kind, at any time prior to the notice of its acceptance given after the effective date. An indication of interest in response to this notification will involve no obligation or commitment of any kind.
I laugh about the language used in that, but also little bit infuriated. How is this, a special program that lets redditors purchase stock considered a good thing for me the end user, in any universe?
Congrats on all you’ve done to help us get to here You ‘reward’ is, you get to spend more @$%@!# MONEY, on us here at Reddit to help Spezzie retire early.
What the, tone deaf, and I can’t stress this enough FUCK.
The redditors are less likely to dump, I’m really not sure how this will play out with people that only care about making money
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Reddit made an initial public offering filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday ahead of its highly-anticipated stock market debut.
It comes almost two decades after Reddit’s launch and will be a major test for the platform that still lags the commercial success of social media contemporaries such as Facebook and Twitter, now known as X.
Reddit was valued at $10bn in a funding round in 2021 and it is unclear what valuation the company will aim for during its share sale in the coming weeks.
Reuters reported on Wednesday that Reddit struck a deal with Alphabet’s Google to make its content available to train the search engine giant’s artificial intelligence (AI) models.
“We believe our growing platform data will be a key element in the training of leading large language models (“LLMs”) and serve as an additional monetization channel for Reddit.”
Reddit had confidentially filed for the IPO in late 2021, but tough economic conditions and the poor performance of listed technology stocks had compelled it to delay the offering.
The original article contains 393 words, the summary contains 173 words. Saved 56%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Insert joker eating popcorn gif here.
Okay:
