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Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

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Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

#31

Post by Someone1234 »

YeahSureWhyNot wrote: post #15

last round was 200 million in July of 2017. if we assume they had around 30 million left of it in bank today that puts them in 10 million negative every month. how does an online community/discussion website that makes money from ads and with not a lot of staff and no other expenses lose 10 million per month? when are they going to become profitable and how? Is it just a tax write off thingy? I never understood these…

Reddit has 230 staff (as of July 2017).

edit (removed wrong maths): $1.9m per month in staffing costs @ 230 employees/100K each. Although a reply below says the staff may have almost doubled and $100K may be a low guestimate for the area (inc. benefits, etc).

My question would be: Why does Reddit have 230+ staff? What do most of them do?

Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

#32

Post by Theodores »

This is a crazy revenue model. It is reminiscent of the dot com era when land grabs were a thing. But a lot has settled down since the fun days and it is not possible to get investors onboard with promises when there is a clear track record.

The track record does look okay:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=reddit

There is continued growth in engagement. But still, shouldn't the actual product - the website - be built out by now with all the content coming from users, therefore not much of a business case for investment? How can they have this continually growing audience and not be making enough bucks to pay the bills and grow organically?

Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

#33

Post by gfwhuuku »

ihuman wrote: post #10

>But supporting and moderating all that content isn’t cheap What? Moderators don't get paid at all to moderate.

They have paid site-wide moderators. I've been banned many times by them, even for posts in very niche subs, and I've also been in many subs that were banned, so I imagine they have a few paid mods like that.

Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

#34

Post by aluminussoma »

Ever since the site redesign in May, popularity has been falling (source: Alexa Top Websites): https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/reddit.com

I hope that affected the amount of money they raised. As a reddit fan, the site redesign has not been pleasant. The mobile experience, too.

Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

#36

Post by kodablah »

I have an idea for Reddit if they want to make money: I know your site is open source, but it is not an easy setup. The mixture between forum, customizable subreddits, and almost chat-like threading is tailor made for intra-company communication. We all feel the pain of ephemeral chat and closed-recipient email to do business. Employees need a way to show off, communicate, post neat things, customize their department's subreddit, etc. But you can't keep the Reddit branding because it is unprofessional.

So...take Reddit, make it easier to install on-prem, charge for this enterprise version, and change the name and default look of this on-prem version to distance itself from the traditional Reddit. Then watch the money roll in as I and others would pay to have more than just a forum (sorry discourse).

Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

#37

Post by jhall1468 »

collyw wrote: post #21
brettgriffin wrote: post #5

I've given up most social media but have become obsessed with Reddit. No matter how much I use it, I'm constantly amazed that I can be immediately connected with the most knowledgeable and enthusiastic people on virtually any subject I care about. I'm not a fan of the redesign or their push to look at other social media platforms, but I understand the direction they have to go to build revenue.

> I can be immediately connected with the most knowledgeable and enthusiastic people on virtually any subject I care about. Politics on Reddit seems to fall into either The_Donald or "Orange man bad" with very little objectivity in the middle in my experience.

/r/politics is fairly left-leaning by US standards, while The_Donald and /r/conservative are hardly about politics anymore. Furthermore, I'd say on a global scale /r/politics is pretty much dead middle, while subreddits like /r/latestagecapitalism represent the far left.

Frankly, Democrats are being pulled to the left by the progressives and Republicans went hard right years ago with the tea party, so the reason there's no middle-of-the-road discussion is because there isn't one anymore. Luxuries of a two-party system.

Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

#38

Post by YeahSureWhyNot »

Someone1234 wrote: post #31
YeahSureWhyNot wrote: post #15

last round was 200 million in July of 2017. if we assume they had around 30 million left of it in bank today that puts them in 10 million negative every month. how does an online community/discussion website that makes money from ads and with not a lot of staff and no other expenses lose 10 million per month? when are they going to become profitable and how? Is it just a tax write off thingy? I never understood these…

Reddit has 230 staff (as of July 2017). edit (removed wrong maths): $1.9m per month in staffing costs @ 230 employees/100K each. Although a reply below says the staff may have almost doubled and $100K may be a low guestimate for the area (inc. benefits, etc). My question would be: Why does Reddit have 230+ staff? What do most of them do?

thats crazy. yeah exactly. what do 230 people do there?

Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

#39

Post by komali2 »

minimaxir wrote: post #16

I've been a fan of Reddit for a very long time (as the amount of data science work I've done with their data can attest to), but lately it seems like the incentives between Reddit as a business and Reddit as a community leader are not aligned, and that is a problem. The increasing amount of dark patterns Reddit has been employing lately is concerning. (recent example: Reddit now gates content in mobile Safari to push…

Re: "Download the app!" gates, banners, etc. Medium does this too.

Why? What's the business reason? What does a native app provide the business that a mobile website doesn't?

Re: Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

#40

Post by pkamb »

minimaxir wrote: post #16

I've been a fan of Reddit for a very long time (as the amount of data science work I've done with their data can attest to), but lately it seems like the incentives between Reddit as a business and Reddit as a community leader are not aligned, and that is a problem. The increasing amount of dark patterns Reddit has been employing lately is concerning. (recent example: Reddit now gates content in mobile Safari to push…

The AMP pages with mobile app pop-up are the worst.

Especially as the cookie is broken so that you get the pop-up every single AMP visit.

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