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Reddit raises $410M in new funding

nytimes.com

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Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#31

Post by ren_engineer »

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…

Reddit userbase is way more hostile to ads on average, more block ads, a lot of the content is non-advertiser friendly, they have less information on their audience for targeting, etc.

Reddit is more forum than social network, they'll need to get creative to make more revenue from users. Winning strategy for them might be to try and get more older users who don't care about ads so much and have lots of money

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#32

Post by weavie »

jonwinstanley wrote: post #22
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!

I'm assuming they already have a load working for them, in my game I'm just thinking about what they could do on top of what they already have...

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#33

Post by DanTheManPR »

weird-eye-issue wrote: post #12
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..

They need more than that for the sole purpose of making the mobile website experience as horrible as possible (and constantly iterating to make it worse and worse)

How else are you going to get people to download the app?

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#34

Post by PEJOE »

nickthemagicman wrote: post #24
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.

Can you please provide more evidence to support this claim? From where I'm sitting, TikTok's and Instagram's businesses would disagree strongly.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#35

Post by adventured »

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.

It is strange. The obvious solution to Reddit's revenue problem was to build a marketplace into the foundation of the network, and they should have done that more than a decade ago.

Etsy, eBay, FB Market, Craigslist, Fiverr, OnlyFans (which was built-up by riding on social media propagation, taking advantage of services like Reddit), and 400 other various types of online markets. There's no reason Reddit could not have have built something substantial in the ecommerce platform space over the years. Taking a small cut from transactions would have eliminated their advertising dependency. Reddit's karma also lends itself easily to forming an ecommerce trust network via transaction feedback, which would form the backbone of buying and selling products or services on there. Reddit figured out to absorb image hosting away from eg Imgur (which also piggybacked off of Reddit to then form a competing social network), and they didn't figure out to do the same thing in the ecommerce space, despite how obvious it was.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#36

Post by swarnie_ »

Not sure how Reddit is worth that much... Are the 50 power mods in charge of 90% of the top subs selling access to state propaganda departments? Actually don't answer that, its painfully obvious.

$ per user revenue is pathetic compared to most social media platforms.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#38

Post by weird-eye-issue »

DanTheManPR wrote: post #33
weird-eye-issue wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They need more than that for the sole purpose of making the mobile website experience as horrible as possible (and constantly iterating to make it worse and worse)

How else are you going to get people to download the app?

Ironically it just made me use Boost (a third party app). So I see absolutely zero Reddit ads unlike if I was using their mobile site...

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#39

Post by michaelbuckbee »

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…

You asked if there was "something intrinsic to Reddit traffic that makes it difficult to monetize?" and the answer is: Yes, they're far less invasive than the other platforms you mentioned.

Just at a very high level:

- no offsite tracking (so no retargeting - the follow you around the internet ads)

- no separate ad network (you can't buy ads on Reddit that show up on 3rd party sites)

- limits on how granular targeting can be (it's by sub-reddit but they exclude many based on size+sensitivity)

- no demographic targeting (you can't pitch your product to males 18-35)

- no fine grained geographic targeting (lowest they go is major metro areas of millions of people)

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#40

Post by leereeves »

ren_engineer wrote: post #31
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…

Reddit userbase is way more hostile to ads on average, more block ads, a lot of the content is non-advertiser friendly, they have less information on their audience for targeting, etc. Reddit is more forum than social network, they'll need to get creative to make more revenue from users. Winning strategy for them might be to try and get more older users who don't care about ads so much and have lots of money

> Winning strategy for them might be to try and get more older users who don't care about ads so much and have lots of money

Won't be easy getting older users on a site where "boomer" is a slur.

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