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Reddit raises $410M in new funding

nytimes.com

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Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#71

Post by trts »

hbosch wrote: post #56
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.

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…

> 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

this seems doubtful to me. Reddit has tons of legendary threads, AMAs and is its own library of content at this point, similar to YouTube. Sure the tech could be replicated but the value is all in the content it generated.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#72

Post by nickthemagicman »

PEJOE wrote: post #34
nickthemagicman wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That wasn't a scientific statement. Just a theory about Reddit. I personally like Reddit because it's not shoving ad's in your face constantly and I think others do as well. Apologies for presenting it without labelling it as a theory. I would edit it now if I could.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#73

Post by weavie »

davewritescode wrote: post #49
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.

> As an amateur you probably don't have enough context to know,

For sure, hence my question!

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#74

Post by mateo411 »

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.

It's easier to track in the app because of the mobile advertising identifier.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#77

Post by Graffur »

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 closed before it was defeated really. I can't remember if it was the v3 or v4 that caused the migration but they didn't even try to roll back... or just stick with their new plan. They just gave up it seems.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#78

Post by SkyPuncher »

zozbot234 wrote: post #61
ren_engineer wrote: post #31

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

> Reddit is more forum than social network Reddit is mostly cat pictures and funny memes at scale, even calling it a "forum" is a stretch. More like a glorified image board.

Two specific feeds, /r/popular and /r/all, are a lot of this.

There are a lot of good niche communities that have deep, meaningful conversation on Reddit.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#79

Post by saisundar »

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 currently supports many third party freemium clients ( Ala Twitter 2012). These third party apps offer a no ad experience too. Unsure how much revenue reddit shares with these apps though.

It helps with growth(more options for users to be on reddit) , but definitely hurts ad inventory, ad targeting insights etc.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#80

Post by tomjen3 »

mateo411 wrote: post #74
CodesInChaos wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit is increasingly forcing mobile users into the app, or to at least make an account. Presumably to improve monetization.

It's easier to track in the app because of the mobile advertising identifier.

That doesn't seem to be the case any more, as nearly everybody opts out of that on iOS.
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