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Reddit raises $410M in new funding

nytimes.com

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Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#21

Post by xeonoex »

weavie wrote: post #4

So, pretend you are in charge of spending $410 million dollars at Reddit. What would you spend it on? From my amateur perspective I've got, 2 web devs, 1 backend engineer, 3 devops. Pay them very generously and that's $1.2 million spent. I have no idea what I would do with the rest..

Employees cost more than just their salary, but I see your point. So far, their attempts to make reddit more profitable have made the user experience terrible. "New" reddit is way worse than old, and is full of nagging you to use the app on mobile, to the point where you can't even view the content. I've never used the official reddit app because I've heard it's terrible, and there are many great alternatives.

I really don't know what they should do with the money other than make reddit more reliable. It was down last night. The value of reddit is the users/community. Technically, it's a modern message board/link aggregator. There are already many clones.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#22

Post by jonwinstanley »

weavie wrote: post #4

So, pretend you are in charge of spending $410 million dollars at Reddit. What would you spend it on? From my amateur perspective I've got, 2 web devs, 1 backend engineer, 3 devops. Pay them very generously and that's $1.2 million spent. I have no idea what I would do with the rest..

Three devops to run a website in the top 25 globally? That would be very impressive!

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#23

Post by useful »

weavie wrote: post #4

So, pretend you are in charge of spending $410 million dollars at Reddit. What would you spend it on? From my amateur perspective I've got, 2 web devs, 1 backend engineer, 3 devops. Pay them very generously and that's $1.2 million spent. I have no idea what I would do with the rest..

Free food to keep people in the office and a giant building in the tenderloin with just enough security gaurds to keep your developers safe inside but unable to safely leave.

also money for rubber ducks

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#24

Post by nickthemagicman »

dcolkitt wrote: post #9

On a visitor perspective, this seems undervalued. This is a 50% or more discount to the market-cap/unique visitor ratio of Twitter, Snap, and Facebook.[1] And all the stats I've seen indicate much higher user engagement and time on site for Reddit compared to the other social platforms. The biggest issue is of course that their monetization is horrible. Like 95% lower per user than the other socials.[2] So the real q…

User Engagement is inversely correlated to monetization.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#26

Post by okasaki »

ausbah wrote: post #8
fnord77 wrote: post #2

yet reddit feels like it is dying. non-political subs with very obvious political agendas. The illusion of popularity-based ranking of articles when in reality it is mostly curated Zero transparency on the moderators the big news and political subs Control freak moderators on special interest subs. Some big investors don't seem to be able to accurately gauge what an internet property is worth. Look at Verizon buying…

reddit has always been dying to people who have been using reddit for a long time, but don't see how that's even remotely true as someone who has used reddit for 7+ years now, the culture is definitely very different (not necessarily good) - but it has only continued to grow in terms of users

But it does feel like it's dying.

For example r/linux has "679169 readers", but if you go to the /new page you'll see it has only had 16 submissions in the past day.

New users are automoderated and shadowbanned to hell. There are subreddits where the experienced users with new accounts go and users upvote each other until they have enough karma to post where they want.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#27

Post by thefounder »

dcolkitt wrote: post #9

On a visitor perspective, this seems undervalued. This is a 50% or more discount to the market-cap/unique visitor ratio of Twitter, Snap, and Facebook.[1] And all the stats I've seen indicate much higher user engagement and time on site for Reddit compared to the other social platforms. The biggest issue is of course that their monetization is horrible. Like 95% lower per user than the other socials.[2] So the real q…

If you use digg as reference the long term outlook of reddit is not that bright.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#28

Post by MattGaiser »

weavie wrote: post #4

So, pretend you are in charge of spending $410 million dollars at Reddit. What would you spend it on? From my amateur perspective I've got, 2 web devs, 1 backend engineer, 3 devops. Pay them very generously and that's $1.2 million spent. I have no idea what I would do with the rest..

You need a mobile team, you need a spam team (or 10), you need people working on a portal for advertisers and the analytics they need, need more than 3 devops for full 24/7 coverage, etc.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#29

Post by keanebean86 »

weavie wrote: post #4

So, pretend you are in charge of spending $410 million dollars at Reddit. What would you spend it on? From my amateur perspective I've got, 2 web devs, 1 backend engineer, 3 devops. Pay them very generously and that's $1.2 million spent. I have no idea what I would do with the rest..

Maybe they finally upgrade the 486sx based server everything runs on?

But seriously they could invest in some content discovery/recommendation features. There are probably a lot of small subreddits that go unnoticed by people that just check /all or /popular.

Their video player needs some major work.

They could decentralize the site. Shard off subreddits by some category system. The homepage would then be an aggregation of the shards. If the main site is down you can potentially still reach some shards.

Of course they would still have a ton of money left over. With a stack this high they could convert the office heater to run directly off cash for a few years.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#30

Post by majormajor »

themanmaran wrote: post #7

I'm honestly surprised to learn that Reddit is still VC dependant. Seems strange to me that a 16 year old company still isn't self sustaining.

The cost is fascinating. Is the value of a single place for all these conversations that much higher than having a bunch of independent forums scattered across the web? For users, there's a high discovery value... but at the cost of apparently far more expense running the site than has been able to be recouped yet.

Curious to see that even where centralization hasn't financially paid off, people are willing to keep tossing money at the dream of it paying off one day after 16 years.

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