Business Reddit files to list IPO on NYSE under the ticker RDDT - Reddit are trying to sell stocks to jannies too while spez made 200 million last year lmfao

• Reddit on Thursday filed to go public.
• Its market debut will mark the first major tech initial public offering of the year and the first social media IPO since Pinterest went public in 2019.
• The social media company, founded in 2005 by technology entrepreneurs Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, has raised about $1.3 billion in funding and has a post valuation of $10 billion, according to deal-tracking service PitchBook.

Social media company Reddit filed its IPO prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday after a yearslong run-up. The company plans to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “RDDT.”

Its market debut, expected in March, will be the first major tech initial public offering of the year. It’s the first social media IPO since Pinterest went public in 2019.

Reddit said it had $804 million in annual sales for 2023, up 20% from the $666.7 million it brought in the previous year, according to the filing. The social networking company’s core business is reliant on online advertising sales stemming from its website and mobile app.

The company, founded in 2005 by technology entrepreneurs Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, said it has incurred net losses since its inception. It reported a net loss of $90.8 million for the year ended Dec. 31, 2023, compared with a net loss of $158.6 million the year prior.

Reddit is one of the most-visited websites in the U.S., according to analytics firm Semrush, but it has struggled to build an online advertising business comparable to those of tech giants such as Facebook parent Meta and Google parent Alphabet.

Reddit has more than 100,000 communities, 73 million average daily active uniques, or DAUq, and 267 million average weekly active uniques, according to the filing. As of the fourth quarter of 2023, Reddit’s U.S. average revenue per user, or ARPU, was $5.51, down from $5.92 from the previous year. The company’s global ARPU was $3.42, which was a 2% year-over-year decline from $3.49.

Reddit said that by 2027 it estimates the “total addressable market globally from advertising, excluding China and Russia, to be $1.4 trillion.” Reddit said the current addressable advertising market is $1.0 trillion, sans China and Russia.

The company is building on its search capabilities and plans to “more fully address the $750 billion opportunity in search advertising that S&P Global Market Intelligence estimates the market to be in 2027.”

Reddit said it plans to use artificial intelligence to improve its ad business and that it expects to open new revenue channels by offering tools and incentives to “drive continued creation, improvements, and commerce.“

It’s also in the early stages of developing and monetizing a data-licensing business in which third parties would be allowed to access and search data on its platform.

For example, Google on Thursday announced an expanded partnership with Reddit that will give the search giant access to the company’s data to, among other uses, train its AI models.

In June, several prominent Reddit moderators locked subreddits as part of a blackout to protest the company’s decision to increase the price some third-party developers pay to use its application programming interface, or API, depending on their usage. At the time, Reddit said the pricing change was necessary because many big tech companies were using data to train large language models.

“In January 2024, we entered into certain data licensing arrangements with an aggregate contract value of $203.0 million and terms ranging from two to three years,” Reddit said, regarding its data-licensing business. “We expect a minimum of $66.4 million of revenue to be recognized during the year ending December 31, 2024 and the remaining thereafter.”

Reddit appears to be investigating a business strategy akin to that of Roblox, which derives the bulk of its revenue from digital sales on its social gaming platform, and online retailer eBay. The company wants to introduce more features to create a user economy that could include games, according to the filing. Reddit said there are currently informal exchanges of physical and digital goods and services that may create another line of revenue.

Reddit will offer three classes of stock with different voting shares. Class A stock will come with one vote per share. Class B shares will come with 10 votes per share and can be converted at any time into one share of Class A stock. Class C shares have no voting rights.

Reddit said that its non-employed moderators, known as Redditors, can participate in the company’s IPO offering through its “directed share program.” Because of this, Reddit said there’s a possibility of “individual investors, retail or otherwise constituting a larger proportion of the investors participating in this offering than is typical for an initial public offering.” Reddit said it had an average of more than 60,000 daily active moderators in December 2023.

“These factors could cause volatility in the market price of our Class A common stock,” the company warned.

Regarding risks, Reddit said its daily active unique figures “may fluctuate or decrease in one or more markets from time to time due to various factors.”

“For example, although we saw increased growth in our user base during the COVID-19 pandemic, we experienced lower levels of DAUq growth and declining DAUq as the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic subsided,” the filing said. “DAUq has also declined in the past in periods following usage peaks surrounding certain worldwide events, such as the onset of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine in the three months ended March 31, 2022, and cultural trends, including video game releases, such as Elden Ring in the three months ended March 31, 2022, and traffic related to r/wallstreetbets in the three months ended March 31, 2021.”

Reddit first filed a confidential draft of its public offering prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission in December 2021. The company has an employee headcount of 2,013 as of December 31, 2023, which was up from 1,942 during the previous year.

Reddit has raised about $1.3 billion in funding and has a post valuation of $10 billion, according to deal-tracking service PitchBook. Publishing giant Condé Nast bought Reddit in 2006. Reddit spun out of Conde Nast’s parent company, Advance Magazine Publishers, in 2011.

Advance now owns 34% of voting power. Other notable shareholders include Tencent and Sam Altman, CEO of startup OpenAI.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/22/reddit-files-to-list-ipo-on-nyse-under-the-ticker-rddt.html (Archive)

Message some jannies received trying to sell stocks to them:

Hello,

TL;DR: – you're invited to a special program that lets redditors purchase stock at the same price as institutional investors when we IPO. Details about eligibility and next steps follow. This (long, dense) message has all the info we can provide due to legal restrictions.

As you may have heard, Reddit has taken steps toward becoming a publicly traded company with the initial public filing of our registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on February 22, 2024. Yes, it's happening.

And because you have helped make Reddit what it is today, you now have the opportunity to become Reddit owners at the same price as institutional investors.

We're offering a Directed Share Program (“DSP”) that invites eligible users and moderators who have contributed to Reddit to participate in our initial public offering (“IPO”). (Including you!)

Program Requirements​

While being selected to pre-register is the first step, there are certain legal and regulatory requirements to participate in the DSP that are outside of Reddit's control. Bear with us here…

To be eligible for the DSP, you must:

• Be a current U.S. resident;

• You will be asked to provide the DSP Administrator a valid social security or permanent resident number, along with other personal information. Reddit will not have access to this data.

• Please note that U.S. residents using a VPN may face application limitations if the VPN locates them in certain non-U.S. jurisdictions.

• Be at least 18 years old;

• Provide your full legal name and an email address;

• Not be a current or former Reddit employee (FTE).

When the DSP launches (a few weeks after pre-registration ends), individuals who have been confirmed for the program will be contacted by our external DSP Administrator. You will then be asked to provide additional information securely to the DSP Administrator to confirm your eligibility.

How to pre-register​

The number of people who can participate in the DSP is limited; we will offer this opportunity to as many redditors as we are able to accommodate. If capacity is reached before the deadline, you will be added to the waitlist. Based on demand, we may also limit the number of shares available.

If you are interested in being part of Reddit's DSP, please go to https://reddit.com/dsp on desktop to complete the pre-registration form. If you are one of the confirmed participants, we will follow up with an email with more details in the coming weeks. You can also refer to the Frequently Asked Questions for more information. Due to regulatory restrictions (yeah… we know…), we are not able to respond to further inquiries or questions.

Pre-registering does not guarantee that you will be invited or able to participate in the DSP; it also does not obligate you to purchase shares.

As with any investment opportunity, you should make an individual decision based on your own personal circumstances and risk tolerance. Therefore, we urge you to review the preliminary prospectus, when available, before deciding whether to invest in Reddit.

The deadline for pre-registering for the DSP is March 5, 2024. If capacity is reached before the deadline, you will be added to the waitlist.

What happens next?​

While there won't be a confirmation email immediately after you pre-register, everyone who pre-registers will receive an email in the coming weeks from “noreply@redditmail.com” telling them whether they can proceed with the next steps for the DSP.

This is an automated message (beep, boop, beep) and does not receive replies. Please refer to the FAQ for more information. Per our lawyercats, we are not able to respond to further inquiries or questions.

Prospectus and Important Disclosures

*The offering will be made only by means of a prospectus. When available, a copy of the preliminary prospectus related to the offering may be obtained from:

Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC, Prospectus Department, 180 Varick Street, New York, New York 10014, or email: prospectus@morganstanley.com; Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC, Attention: Prospectus Department, 200 West Street, New York, New York 10282, telephone: 1-866-471-2526, facsimile: 212-902-9316, or email: prospectus-ny@ny.email.gs.com; J.P. Morgan Securities LLC, Attention/o Broadridge Financial Solutions, 1155 Long Island Avenue, Edgewood, New York 11717, telephone: 1-866-803-9204, or email: prospectus-eq_fi@jpmorgan.com; and BofA Securities, Inc., NC1-022-02-25, 201 North Tryon Street, Charlotte, North Carolina 28255-0001, Attention: Prospectus Department, telephone: 1-800-294-1322, or email: dg.prospectus_requests@bofa.com.*

A registration statement relating to these securities has been filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission but has not yet become effective. These securities may not be sold nor may offers to buy be accepted prior to the time the registration statement becomes effective. This notification shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy these securities, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation, or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction.

No offer to buy the securities can be accepted and no part of the purchase price can be received until the registration statement has become effective, and any such offer may be withdrawn or revoked, without obligation or commitment of any kind, at any time prior to the notice of its acceptance given after the effective date. An indication of interest in response to this notification will involve no obligation or commitment of any kind.

Spez made almost 200 million last year too:



And it's important for the jannies to do it for free:



SEC filing attached and can be found here: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1713445/000162828024006294/reddits-1q423.htm (Archive)

 

[GilaCutter]

In the end all of reddit melts down to ad friendly orange Fanta.

Oh is that what the bathtub hrt looks like?

 

[ordersolplusR]

I decided to go slumming and check out le Reddit and boy are the lefties seething.

Turns out you have to disclose CEO salary in your IPO paperwork and Spez hauls in a kool $193 million a year.

That's a lot of dosh for a do nothing CEO so the NEETs are raging and mods are talking another blackout.

Fun times ahead for the troon model brigade.

So they can just pussy out again when breadit tells them they're gonna lose their janny powers? lmao

 

[sheepworldvizor]

Jannies who spend every waking hour deleting comments and posting selfies surely don't have spare cash for investment? These are coomers with autism, not normal people with retirement fund strategies.

 

[Pill Cosby]

In six months Reddit’s stock will be worth less than Reddit silver.

 

[Absolutego]

I'm getting visions of the 1990s tech boom, when everyone and his brother started a tech company in the hopes of getting Wall Street's billions. Many companies failed. I predict Reddit will either meet an ignominious end, or become a meme stock like GameStop.

Let's get some perspective here. Reddit has its problems but if it were aping the worst excesses of the dotcom boom it would've gone public ca. 2009. They were throwing money around from 1997-1999 like it was going out of style, path to profitability be damned. If anything, the SEC/Wall Street being overly cautious as a result of the dotcom boom (and that of social media around the same time Reddit should've IPO'd) is why it took this long for them to exit the endless fundraising rounds to actually make an effort to IPO.

Reddit doesn't have the goodwill for people to rally around preventing it being shorted into oblivion as a way to stick it to Wall Street a la Gamestop. If anything, the average non-redditor wants to short it themselves.

 

[Konsume]

Remember when reddit used to be vilified by Something Awful of all places?

There used to be tons of posts about if you used reddit you were a pedo because of r/jailbait. Im surprised they actually got rid of that sub considering that r/teenagers is still a thing.

Fun fact: the Reddit CEO, Steve Hoffman, was the one who ran the jailbait subreddit.

 

[national-lagannist]

I'll probably get a bunch of rainbows for this... but it would be hilarious if the shareholders dragged admins over the coals for all the woke shit. The more woke shit they push, the worse the stock does, and the more the admins get reamed.

They won't. Anyone who'd invest would be investing FOR the woke shit.

 

[Otis Mallebrok]

Lol, spez makes 200 million dollars a year, while the jannies make 0$. And now he wants them to buy stock.

Its time to pay up jannies. Uncle spez needs another sportscar and a yacht, and you are now officially required to pay in order to retain your precious mod-powers.

 

[Tanner Glass]

Here's a question:

Why do companies become publicly traded at all?

Like, even if we assume Reddit was doing well (and that's a big if)... everything I've ever heard about becoming publicly traded is that it puts you under the thumb of shareholders and you lose control over your own destiny, and then if you have a string of bad luck you get held accountable and they basically take your company from you.

Maybe that's just a movie myth, I dunno.

But like... I've only ever heard bad things about becoming publicly traded, never good. So why bother?

The transition to Publicy Traded from Privately Owned is where big investors and executives make their money.

For example - people are memeing (correctly) that spez (Reddit's CEO) made 200 Million Dollars but the reality is that only 500k of it was in cash. The other 199.5 million is in stock and stock options - so for him to cash out someone has to buy in. The COO, CFO, and most execs down to your Senior Directors have a similar breakdown so it's in the company's interest to generate value and cash out.

For smaller companies - you just simply get bought out by a bigger company (which is why Start Ups were so common) but for something the size of Reddit it isn't really an option. The kind of companies that could spend $10 billion on reddit in 2017 passed and they're not going to spend $5 billion on it now. The number of companies that could are few and far between and none of them likely want to bother (what the fuck would a car company do with Reddit?) - doubly so with the big question mark around "Reddit jannies all work for free and we still don't make money how do we fix it".

So by going Public - the execs can cash out one stock at a time by selling pieces of it to smaller investors.

 

[Lady Adjani]

For a company worth literal millions they have one of the worst layouts imaginable, those old school stock phpbb forums looked better and were ten times easier to navigate.

 

[Pissmaster]

I just wonder whats the point of bots scraping data from other bots. The whole bussiness model of social media was farm the human cattle to marketeers and political parties but right now on every major site robot content outweights real human content by several leagues and it became exponentially worse precisely because of AI.

Its robots posting garbage and robots replying and sharing it. Extrancting data from that is completely worthless. I know ad agencies like to use inflated data from botnets to scam their clients into bad strategies but eventually someone has to do the math and find out this shit is all trash and burning money.

That is a good way to put why I think AI is more of a fad than anything, and its whole market is going to crash. Not only is all that scraping and processing of cyclical data worthless, but it takes some serious, serious computing power. Remember all that kvetching about cryptocurrency eating a lot of power and resources? AI processing has the same requirements.

 

[Kuritan Deplorable]

That is a good way to put why I think AI is more of a fad than anything, and its whole market is going to crash.

Disagree and Agree in equal measure here - The AI bubble will most certainly pop, people are going fucking nuts over this, thinking that GPT style LLM's are one step removed from Generalized AI, the true holy grail of the field. In reality, LLM's bring us no closer to generalized AI than we were before, they're just a novel venture in data extrapolation. Good enough for casual consumer engagement and stuff that doesn't rely on perfection, and unreliable at best for anything else. The overinflated expectations have thrown the bubble to insane levels.

Current AI will probably not go the way of the fad though, but the touchscreen. Remember after the iPhone came out and suddenly everything under the sun was trying to implement buttonless touch screen interfaces? And outside of a few use cases, all of them died off because they were stupid and not actually preferable to the original physical interface. AI interfaces are incredible tools for accessibility and 'human friendly' interface as its basically the holy grail of a completely different (and originally intended as far as I'm aware) field, Natural Language Interfaces. The nature of the current systems mean that they can actually understand the intent of a badly phrased question to a degree, and correct for it. That's actually incredibly useful when you stop trying to use it to pull data from its training fog, and instead wrap it around an API interface to reach out to systems and get real source of truth data - Then have the model parse that data and use it to build a proper natural language response. The gaming uses of LLM's are actually a good example of this - Use the model to respond to arbitrary user input and provide coherent sounding responses, pinging a world lore book and interacting with a quest generating system as needed to provide that dynamic content and engagement.

But this is a lower value field than "Generalized AI" by a dozen orders of magnitude or more, and the value of training data will reflect that. More importantly, as it moves away from trying to train the model to know everything on its own forever and towards just training it to talk like a human, the data issue almost goes away entirely, as its a space that can, and almost has, "Been Solved".

 

[Buck Broken Chimp]

I want to say something about the blackout that I don't think has been talked about.

It's no secret reddit's blackout was mostly a failure. However I think people don't understand why. The common narritive is that the reddit mods like reddit to much and don't to give it up. That might be true for some of them to some degree.

I think the real reason the mods had no conviction was because they didn't want to give up their power. A lot of them are political extremist and didn't want to lose what little power they had to control the discourse.

Bardfin an infamous reddit power janny basically said as him herself (apparently Bardfin is a natal woman I have seen her dox). This is the most reddit mod shit I have ever seen. It is so conspiratorial, this is some Blueanon shit right here. If you don't know Blueanon is a phenomen observed in political discourse. It is a portmanteau of Blue and Qanon. What it basically refers to is the fact that the Biden supporting neo liberals in America are conspiracy theorist. They blatantly are, however since they (or more accurately the people they support) are in power they get to decide what's true and what's not. I have always said that the face of the Blueanon phenomenon is Movie bob, he is so conspiratorial. He thinks that gamer gate was an organized right wing attempt to takeover gaming, he thinks that halo 4 was released on election day to stop Obama from winning, despite also claiming that people who play first person shooters are right wing so if anything this would help Obama.

Archive here

I just want to add this, old reddit threads are insufferable to read. There are so many deleted comments. The reason why is because of the Karma system you basically have to delete your comment as soon as it starts getting downvotes or else you risk people jumping on the bandwagon. For those who don't know on reddit most subs have karma limits. I guess it could also be sensitive redditors who don't like being confronted and jannies deleting anything they don't like.


So chat, despite what we all think of reddit do you think it is a good investment from a pure money standpoint ? I don't think it is. I already elaborated more on why before, but in short reddit is just to inaccessible for the "normie" (I don't like using this word but it fits for these purposes) demographic that reddit is in theory supposed to cater to. A lot of zoomers don't want a mostly text based social network, but what they want even less is to have to put in work to get what they want. Do to the way the Karma system works on reddit you have to jump through a lot of hoops posting bullshit you don't care about to maybe get the karma you want to post on the subs you do care about.

In the age of TikTok that is a bad value proposition. I know TikTok doesn't have a lot of value for people like us but for the majority of people it is great at getting them the content they want with the least effort. Not to mention the fact you can get negative Karma and you start at 1 Karma means that if you piss of a few redditors (which is very easy to do) then you are basically fucked because even most of the subs with no Karma limit have it set to 0.

The problem is the older/more alternative audience that would have more interest in the text based format and would be willing to put in more effort for what they want. Doesn't want to deal with reddit's draconian hugbox. They are edgier and or have alternative political beliefs that don't fly on reddit.

It has come to my attention Bardfin is a tranny, I saw his dox a few years ago and wasn't able to tell since it only mentioned his fake trans name. I am issuing this correction

 

[Party Hat Wurmple]

So are we all of the consensus to make our couple hundred quick cash and then start hedging like crazy against this?

 

[DavidS877]

Bardfin an infamous reddit power janny basically said as him herself (apparently Bardfin is a natal woman I have seen her dox).

Like many things, there's a thread for that. And he's a male.

 

[Buck Broken Chimp]

Like many things, there's a thread for that. And he's a male.

They are a troon ? I first saw Bardfin's dox through some infographic that was circulating in the telegram chats I was in at the time and there was only a small picture of him, ok thanks for the information fren.

 

[Romper Stomper]

I'll probably get a bunch of rainbows for this... but it would be hilarious if the shareholders dragged admins over the coals for all the woke shit. The more woke shit they push, the worse the stock does, and the more the admins get reamed.

Retarded burger culture war schlop is probably the last thing on the list of things investors give a shit about if it's even on it.

 

[Kuritan Deplorable]

Retarded burger culture war schlop is probably the last thing on the list of things investors give a shit about if it's even on it.

In so far as which side is what, you're entirely right. However, culture war flareups tend to end with claims of various levels of fucked up child abuse or terroristic plotting, depend. The last thing you want to be investing in is a platform with constant scandals in that vein. Reddit would have a very very bad time if they got hit with their own variation of the adpocalypse if advertisers were encouraged to look closer at what's going on. And that kind of revenue drop is exactly what investors do give a shit about.

 

[Flatsfag]

One thing that can't get me the stop scratching my head is why the hell would they want money from Reddit mods? they know they got not a dime to their name
Even if they give them a few dollars here and there how long do you think till the stock craters?
It scares me to think of all the fags jumping from Reddit to other places

 

[Null]

One thing that can't get me the stop scratching my head is why the hell would they want money from Reddit mods? they know they got not a dime to their name
Even if they give them a few dollars here and there how long do you think till the stock craters?
It scares me to think of all the fags jumping from Reddit to other places

Your question got into Approval Queue and while approving it I was thinking it over. I've come to the conclusion that Reddit saw /r/WallStreetSilver and the GameStop short squeeze and thought maybe they could get users to buy stock of the platform they use. They don't realize their users absolutely detest them and the mods they're shilling to also fucking hate them.