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Reddit raises $410M in new funding

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Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#51
Reddit is a marketeers dream. Every corporation, product, game, movie studio and consumer device has a big team dedicated to using Reddit for free. Submissions memes and comments are posted by the teams, often out in the open. Reddit gets no income from this advertising.

If Reddit were to start looking at charging for these, the platform might change drastically. I'm not sure how, however.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#52
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 a Reddit coin? Use that money to mine it and then seed the Reddit ecosystem at first with coin upvotes/awards, build a merch market for subreddit specific merch, allow advertisers to list items on the marketplace funneling sales there from Reddit ads/promoted posts, original content -> NFT…

I don’t know the details but I think the core base of Reddit would be into a project like that.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#53
As someone who tried to advertise on reddit (though it was > 1-2 years ago, so things may have changed)-- Reddit, along with Twitter, is very advertiser unfriendly. And Im not just talking about the users.

I literally couldnt give them my money. I wanted to target a specific subreddit, but couldnt buy any impressions on it for 3 months. The app kept forcing me to advertise on /all, or all technology reddits, which wasnt what I wanted. I did buy $10 of ads, got zero clicks, surprise surprise.

The thing was hard to setup, hard to run, hard to measure, not to mention, advertisers get treated like any other account. I was shadow banned because I was linking to one domain, and reddit considered me a spammer. But I was like, that *is* the whole purpose of advertising. I was forced to post a few cat pictures, just so I could run my ads.

Never again.

I note they have since revamped their ad site-- now there is a new site, but you have to reregister to run ads, and I dont want the hassle.

Yes, everyone hates ads, but thats how free sites make money.

Some redditors were hostile to ads, but the number isnt that big. Most users were indifferent.

Such an ad-hostile company, I wonder how they make money.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#54
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not by a long shot. Boomers are still the highest in spending[1]. I was a broke college student forever and somewhat broke for the years or so after (no loans I worked through college). I’m in the 30-40 range with kids and I spend much more than my twenties.

Lots of college students are spending their parents money for these kinds of things.

[1] https://resources.datadrivenmarketing.equifax.com/dyks-equif...

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#55

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 t…

> 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?

The problem with "independent forums scattered across the web" is that they make discovery (of users and service instances) harder. There are ways around this, like the Fediverse and SOLID standards, but most bulletin-board-like forums do not support them as of yet out of the box.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#56

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.

Reddit seems to me like a very hard product to monetize. As a daily user I get a ton of milage out of Reddit Enhancement Suite (desktop) and Apollo (iOS), in combination with typical ad-blockers. Combine that with the low friction of sign up (disposable e-mails allowed, no confirmation needed, sitewide bans rare) and the tacit allowance of "objectionable" content (porn, gore, hate speech, harassment, etc.)... you don't really have fertile ground for meaningful engagement from an advertiser perspective.

Not only that, but if Reddit were to strongly disallow any or all of the above we have seen how EASY it is to simply clone the tech and re-host. There have been stories about certain communities being exiled from Reddit only to spring up just as quickly elsewhere with more or less the same exact user experience...

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#57
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..

>So, pretend you are in charge of spending $410 million dollars at Reddit. What would you spend it on?

Most of it probably goes straight to AWS.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#58
post #56

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.

Reddit seems to me like a very hard product to monetize. As a daily user I get a ton of milage out of Reddit Enhancement Suite (desktop) and Apollo (iOS), in combination with typical ad-blockers. Combine that with the low friction of sign up (disposable e-mails allowed, no confirmation needed, sitewide bans rare) and the tacit allowance of "objectionable" content (porn, gore, hate speech, harassment, etc.)... you don…

> As a daily user I get a ton of milage out of Reddit Enhancement Suite (desktop) and Apollo (iOS), in combination with typical ad-blockers.

Most users aren't going to do this. Really, the reddit folks should just go all-in on tailoring their official apps towards the most casual, highly "engaged" content consumers, and target most of their monetization towards that kind of user. As a bonus, make it trivially easy to post casual content directly from the app. Who cares about "objectionable" content when they'll have so many cat pictures and cute/funny memes to run their ads next to.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tracking and driving engagement via notifications are some of the most important reasons why app users can be monetized better than anonymous web users (user sees more ads if they're spending more time, and tracking allows better targeted and thus higher paying ads)

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#60
post #13

How do they come up with this? Is the long death of reddit, really the TikTok-isation of reddit into yet another vapid commercial meh-space? Will this actually succeed, or is this the pump before the dump?

> How do they come up with this? You mean the valuation? It's a simple formula of ([money raised] / [shares issued]) * [total shares outstanding]

Just a linear regress on what they raised so far?

Ok, fair enough. feels overvalued though.

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