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Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B

bloomberg.com

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Re: Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B

#121

Post by methodin »

JosephLark wrote: post #120
jknoepfler wrote: post #89

I stopped using reddit when they put a "USE OUR MOBILE APP OR DIE" message that cannot be closed conveniently on their mobile page. There is no possible advantage that can accrue to me by giving them app-level access to my device rather than running in my browser, which I trust far more than I trust them. They are literally a dynamic, partitioned page-ranking system, why in the heck would I ever let that escape the b…

I very rarely load up reddit on mobile but did so this morning and noticed the exact same message and couldn't believe it. The selling feature they use for the mobile app on that message was that it was faster than the mobile site. I don't see why that needs to be the case - it seems the reason the mobile site is slow is because they force it to do client side rendering. Or at the very least, just that it's Javascrip…

I can't help but think to myself "it's faster because I don't have to erroneously click out or onto this obnoxious popup ad"

Re: Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B

#122

Post by mercurial »

makecheck wrote: post #102

It seems like Reddit would be a good candidate for experimenting with tiny fees: namely, $12 per year just to use it. That’s one (moderately priced) lunch in total, a dollar a month, for a site that provides a huge amount of content and discussion or just distraction. Far less than one crappy movie in a theater, too. And if everyone paid this, they’d have tons of cash.

I think paywalling reddit would kill it. It's not like Reddit Gold is very expensive ($30 a year). But I do think that simple friction (needing to hand over one's credit card information) is a barrier, combined with the fact that the Gold benefits are far from essential.

Re: Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B

#123

Post by icelancer »

makecheck wrote: post #102

It seems like Reddit would be a good candidate for experimenting with tiny fees: namely, $12 per year just to use it. That’s one (moderately priced) lunch in total, a dollar a month, for a site that provides a huge amount of content and discussion or just distraction. Far less than one crappy movie in a theater, too. And if everyone paid this, they’d have tons of cash.

>And if everyone paid this

"If I just capture ONE PERCENT of this nine figure market, I'll be rich!" -standard entrepreneurial slide deck

The paid rate would be well under 1%. Potentially an order of magnitude lower than that.

Re: Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B

#125

Post by Nition »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #98
theprop wrote: post #95

Last I heard Reddit was doing less than $10 mn / year in revenues. It's highly under-monetized, but it looks difficult to grow in 5 to 10 years to generating $150 million in annual profits to justify this valuation. I'm surprised Reddit stays so popular. I stopped using it ~8 years ago. The habit didn't stick with me (beyond a year or two).

I don't understand how investors still think that "Step 1: get a lot of users, step 3: profit" is a great business model.

Especially since it's more like

Step 1: Get a lot of users

Step 2: Major losses

Step 3: ?????

Step 4: Profit?

Re: Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B

#126

Post by pirocks »

nso wrote: post #107
makecheck wrote: post #102

It seems like Reddit would be a good candidate for experimenting with tiny fees: namely, $12 per year just to use it. That’s one (moderately priced) lunch in total, a dollar a month, for a site that provides a huge amount of content and discussion or just distraction. Far less than one crappy movie in a theater, too. And if everyone paid this, they’d have tons of cash.

You'd probably be suprised to learn that for large chunks of reddits demographics 12 USD is a large sum of money.

Like teenagers. Source: Am a teenager.

Re: Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B

#127

Post by abvdasker »

makecheck wrote: post #102

It seems like Reddit would be a good candidate for experimenting with tiny fees: namely, $12 per year just to use it. That’s one (moderately priced) lunch in total, a dollar a month, for a site that provides a huge amount of content and discussion or just distraction. Far less than one crappy movie in a theater, too. And if everyone paid this, they’d have tons of cash.

This would work out horribly for Reddit because it would make them vulnerable to any competitor that markets itself as "Free Reddit". Like most social media, Reddit's moat is its user base not its feature set. Anything that would drive away users would be tantamount to suicide.

Re: Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B

#128

Post by shostack »

ben_jones wrote: post #70
minimaxir wrote: post #48

Here's a quick chart of the monthly number of submissions to Reddit over time (until April 2017): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1d3kqAebZiUqmI-GbmvNY... At about the start of 2017, Reddit saw a noticeable increase in the activity growth rate, which investors love (although the biggest chunk occurred around October/November 2016, due to the U.S. Election) And here's the BigQuery to reproduce the aggregation:…

Are there any studies being done in the increase of bot accounts used for social media manipulation and other such marketing purposes?

If not bots then shills. There was a massive increase in obvious shills/bots in the various political subs leading up to the election and through today (although less so than before the election).

Let's get some engagement stats on those user counts.

Re: Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B

#129

Post by johnfn »

rickhanlonii wrote: post #96
johnfn wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ages ago an admin said "yeah it would make sense for post titles to be edited within the first x minutes of making one", an incredibly low-hanging fruit that has been requested since forever. It still hasn't been added.

I can think of a few problems with this just off the top of my head: The first x minutes of a post are _heavily_ influential in the success of the post, editing after allows you to hijack successful titles for gain (spam) For large subs, posts only hit the top of /new for x minutes (for small x), editing after is basically useless if it's not successful in that time Mods patrol the /new queue as posts come in, allowi…

I mean whatever your concerns are, the admins/developers of Reddit are okay with this change.

Re: Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B

#130

Post by shostack »

jacquesm wrote: post #29

Trying to imagine the kind of strategy that will yield a large enough multiple of that valuation to satisfy the new investors, or the kind of strategy that would create an annual ROI that would keep them happy. And failing. Anybody have any idea what the long term game plan is here?

As a user, I fear it is increased monetization in the form of more aggressive tracking and advertising.

Their pushes for email registration and the feed-based ads in the mobile app make that direction pretty well telegraphed.

But I'd draw an interesting parallel here with the fact that, like Snapchat, many Reddit users do it with some expectation of anonymity/privacy. It is difficult to command the kind of CPMs Google and Facebook can without knowing an awful lot about uniquely identified users. Reddit has a comment and engagement data goldmine at their fingertips, but they need to burn through a heck of a lot of user trust to leverage it to its full potential.

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