What the hell does a site like Reddit do with almost half a billion dollars?! That's insane.
For example, they could provide a hidden (and very expensive) API for hedge funds, so that they could manipulate stock prices more conveniently.
Reddit raises $410M in new funding
131–140 of 507 posts
Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding
#132So, 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..
Basically this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28157551
Build an integrated market, initially aimed at competing with Craigslist, and maybe expanded to target other markets later (Ebay, etsy, etc). Craigslist first because its similarly simple UI and design is the easiest to recreate within Reddit.
There's tons of subreddits for connecting buyers and sellers of niche goods, but the actual buying and selling has to happen elsewhere. It's stupid that Reddit hasn't capitalized on that yet.
Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding
#133On 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…
There is a LOT standing in the way of monetization for Reddit: - younger user base (so less disposable income) - loose concept of user identity, so can't tailor ads - more corpoarate and mainstream advertisers tend to stay away due to the nature of the community and content shared - primary usage is on web rather than mobile apps All of these are fixable, but the question is can they do so without alienating their us…
I agree with most of what you say, but I thought most of the usage was now on the mobile app?
By most, I mean the vast majority (hence my perplexion and need to comment and confirm my understanding)
Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
the mods are even worse than admins in many respects. mods for popular subs have considerable control over what is allowed or not. Many subs have enormous blacklists of users,domains,and even words. As well as stupid, arbitrary content guidelines pertaining to length, the title, the body, and other stuff. Reddit admins have the most power but they tend to not get involved unless a sitewide rule is broken.
So join a different community on Reddit whose rules you like better, or make one. Why does everyone have to allow everything?
I think that once a sub attracts a large amount of readers, it's unethical to block certain conversations.
For large subs like /r/politics, a select few people get to control what's fed into the eyeballs of millions of people. And we don't even know what content wasn't allowed to be posted, how can we trust they're unbiased?
Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding
#135Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding
#136On 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…
One thing that they do not seem to be taking advantage of is how specialized many of their communities are. It seems primed for letting advertisers target to specific audiences, but as a user I don't really feel like the ads I get are targeted to what I read at all? Maybe I am uninformed but it seems like an advertising goldmine that hasn't been taken advantage of. If you are a PC components retailer, users of /r/bui…
I tried to advertise a product to a very niche group on reddit. I just wanted to select 4 specific sub-reddits and advertise to anyone that was a member or viewed that reddit.
For some reason, reddit wouldn't let me advertise to 3 of the 4, and the 1 that they did let me advertise was very low volume (less than 100 members). I couldn't even get reddit to show a single ad, let alone have anyone click on it.
Facebook brought in way more traffic, and some of it did convert, but I feel like my advertising costs were too high there, since you can only specify more general interests. It seems like reddit, had their advertising platform actually worked, would have been the perfect place for me.
Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding
#137As 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 wa…
>Yes, everyone hates ads, but thats how free sites make money.
Maybe a simple user forum site doesn't need to make mega valuation levels of money. Maybe it, and other low effort sites like Facecrook and Twatter, should be run as public benefit corps. These companies aren't selling state of the art tech here - why do they need to be such money makers??
Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding
#138What the hell does a site like Reddit do with almost half a billion dollars?! That's insane.
It's not easy to run a company with as many users as they have.
As a mod, they've put a lot of work recently into flagging trolls and astroturf accounts, and still have a lot of work to do. I run r/sanfrancisco, and wow there's a ton of bots and trolls flooding our sub about the Newsom recall.
They also seem to really want to find a way to monetize content in a new way. They've flirted with crypto and awards, but I imagine they have strong ambitions around how they can reward creators and moderators in a healthy, non-ad-based-way. (Their ads are the worst of all the big social networks, given how anonymous their base is. So they're forced to innovate, which I think is good for everyone.)
Plus the usual suspects (infrastructure, traditional demand gen marketing, paid moderation, etc).
Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding
#139On 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…
I don't think Reddit will ever scale as well as something like Facebook . The bigger Reddit gets, the less usable it becomes due to subs becoming too crowded.
The whole point of reddit is that the crowding issue is self-correcting -- you just move to a new sub. I like to envision it as a malthusian catastrophe -- as the population starts reaching capacity limits, people start grumbling more and more.. until suddenly they far overshoot the capacity, and leave en-masse to new subs. In one fell swoop, the original sub is left near-empty, and out of the many new subs created in that instant, a few survive with healthy populations.
Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Maybe that points to a way they could make $: curate and make anthologies of the actually valuable content. /r/askhistorians content could be turned into a few history books.
Of course, then people might start looking at the fact that they are giving away valuable property to Reddit in return for access to a simple forum site...