Reddit raises $410M in new funding • Hacker News Board

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#211

Post by twobitshifter » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 10:09 PM UTC

adventured wrote: post #35

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 ha…

Reddit even has communities where sales are made like r/MechanicalKeyboards and those communities use karma and transaction tracking to rank sellers - the communities have done the proof of concept for them.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#212

Post by mustacheemperor » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 10:11 PM UTC

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #184

buu700 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Offhand, /r/legaladvice, /r/AskHistorians, and /r/AskScience stand out as being heavily moderated to the benefit of overall content quality. I don't see how any of those would be political propaganda (left-wing or otherwise).

I have never tried the latter two, but the first one is a very good example of a notoriously bad advice subreddit that almost all lawyers dislike for spreading constant misinformation, and often even seeing people that say the correct thing be banned by the moderators. There are almost no actual lawyers on that subreddit for two reasons: A) actual lawyers would like to see compensation for their expertise; B) in many…

The latter two subreddits really do have excellent content, they are worth checking out.

/r/legaladvice is so bad there is actually a subreddit dedicated to discussing what's posted there, /r/bestoflegaladvice. There's more attorneys in that sub than the actual legal advice sub, where a surprising amount of advice is either blatantly wrong or essentially "just tell the police everything, they'll help."

/r/audiophile and /r/wine are two other well moderated subreddits, where the discussion has remained relatively focused and high quality even as the communities have grown, because the moderators aggressively prune low-effort and unrelated content. There was big drama, once upon a time, when /r/audiophile banned anything headphone related.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#213

Post by spfzero » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 10:11 PM UTC

gruez wrote: post #41

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

>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.

That demographic is most sought-after by advertisers because it is the easiest to influence. The ads work better on them.

For whatever reason, maybe just because they've seen more ads, older demographics are harder to reach.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#214

Post by ryandrake » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 10:12 PM UTC

pageandrew wrote: post #117

paulpauper wrote: post #81

Earlier 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.

I've been permanently banned from almost all of the top COVID related subs for daring to discuss disallowed topics, like the Wuhan lab, as well as expressing anti-lockdown sentiments. My appeals have been instantly denied as well. I understand the idea that subreddits are user-run communities and should be able to self-moderate, but there are a couple problems with this: 1. Reddit claims to be the "front page of the…

I was going to say, there are plenty of subs for pedaling that kind of content, but looks like the major one, r/NoNewNormal was just quarantined (ironic) today, which is often the first step towards a total ban. Reddit's a private company, and if they don't want that kind of content on their site, shouldn't that be their choice?

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#215

Post by mschuster91 » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 10:15 PM UTC

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…

> 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.

Most people have one Snap / FB account and one, maximum two Twitter accounts... but throwaways are the norm on Reddit (as well as HN), which means Reddit's user count is inflated by quite a bit. Additionally, Reddit has large nsfw communities that draw lots of members and visitors (again, most with separate accounts!), and these can't be reasonably monetized at all.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#216

Post by morpheos137 » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 10:17 PM UTC

hbosch wrote: post #57

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..

>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.

Does reddit really use aws for hosting, cds?

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#217

Post by paulcole » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 10:20 PM UTC

wintermutestwin wrote: post #127

initplus wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sounds like a great way to prod those specialized communities to bail to the next diggredditetc. People are going to those specialized communities to get real information from real users, not lies and misinformation (ads and marketing).

>People are going to those specialized communities to get real information from real users, not lies and misinformation (ads and marketing).

Those specialized communities will cease to exist without something funding them.

Either users get ready to get out their wallets or get used to ads and marketing (which are not wholly lies and misinformation). And more importantly remember it's Reddit's choice how users pay, not the end users.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#218

Post by listenallyall » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 10:21 PM UTC

slugiscool99 wrote: post #162

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comments make perfect sense in light of the fact that Reddit is the world's largest free porn site, with just enough "social" sprinkled on top to keep you engaged between wanks.

The only information I could find claims that about 22% of reddit is NSFW. They calculated the percentage of NSFW subreddits with >100k subscribers. [1] That's far from a perfect way to measure this, but it's around the statistic that 30% of the internet is porn. My intuition tells me Reddit probably reflects the internet as a whole pretty well. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/f94j0y/oc_...

Doesn't matter the percentage of subreddits (i.e. counting every qualifying subreddit equally), what is the percentage of eyeballs? And don't you think lots of people view porn subreddits without subscribing?

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#219

Post by spfzero » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 10:22 PM UTC

paulpauper wrote: post #85

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…

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 long-tail subs will never get too crowded. If you have found a niche where like-minded people hang out, there will never be a whole lot more of them, and however many more there are, it's a positive.

I'm thinking vintageaudio, lv426, subs like that.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#220

Post by shuntress » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 10:24 PM UTC

initplus wrote: post #123

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…

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…

If you will suffer a brief crash course on ad terminology, you are describing "placements". A placement with an ad in it shown to a user is called an "impression".

I agree that advertisers would pay reddit more for better ad space (also called "inventory") but that doesn't just happen automatically.

Right now, I would assume they are integrating with some third party ad network and probably use fairly generic targeting information. The cost in time and money to either deepen that integration or rip it out and make a custom ad network is probably significant.