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Reddit raises $410M in new funding

nytimes.com

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Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#41

Post by gruez »

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

Isn't the most sought-after demographic 18-35 because they have the most disposable income? Afterwards disposable income drops off because of kids and/or retirement.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#42

Post by [deleted] »

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!

[deleted]

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#43

Post by jdavis703 »

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…

Those publicly traded social media sites are valued at that rate by the public. It’s possible that VC’s are:

1) Valuing the company in the hopes of making a profit on the IPO 2) More conservative than public markets

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#44

Post by marketingtech »

I would imagine most of these investments will go to three places:

* Sales - start generating revenue from all these eyeballs, leveraging your interest graph for targeting. this requires way more headcount than you'd expect, especially to chase enough revenue to justify a $10b valuation

* Safety - beyond all the well-discussed dangers of large-scale user forums, this also impacts monetization. you don't want to subject the average new user to extreme/alt/adult content (though you can still offer space for those communities) or else you may scare them off. major advertisers want "brand safety" and want to avoid being associated with upsetting or even mildly profane content

* Regulatory - dozens of countries and states are rolling out unique regulations around privacy, data usage, and user rights. this is a nightmare to navigate from both a product and legal sense

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#45

Post by sushid »

spike021 wrote: post #37

Yet routinely their service still has incredibly poor performance and there are bugs in their iOS app that have been around for months. Crazy.

It was also down for a few hours this week. Can't think of many 11 figure companies that go down as often as Reddit does.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#46

Post by DocTomoe »

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…

As a reddit user for more than a decade: Reddit has always been dying (for me personally, it was the digg exodus). Everything you describe has been around for at least 5 years.

Reddit will die when there is something better (for the user experience) available. Right now, I do not see a better general-purpose forum alternative.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#47

Post by ruined »

thefounder wrote: post #27
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.

digg died fifteen years ago. clearly a lot has changed, and the mistakes that killed digg have not been made.

and i think reddit is beyond the point at which a digg-style fuckup could kill them. at worst you might see cadres of ideological users depart for something like lemmy, which is already happening to an extent, but there is a lot of space to flee internally, so most users don't feel the pressure. and diffusion to federated media is in the future for every mass audience. reddit has such a huge and active userbase it will dominate for the foreseeable future.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#49

Post by davewritescode »

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..

As an amateur you probably don't have enough context to know, but what you see on a superficial level of the product is probably about Reddit awards, payments, ad analytics, SRE is probably 100+ engineers right there without even talking about the core experience, mobile app and security folks.

The platforms that run 8 figure companies need tons of redundancy in both application code/infrastructure and people.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#50

Post by Scoundreller »

CodesInChaos wrote: post #14
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 is increasingly forcing mobile users into the app, or to at least make an account. Presumably to improve monetization.

And tracking/notifications. Which is of course why I don’t install it.
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