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)

 

[Terrifik]

Wait, really? How long has he been making $200 mil a year?

I call Shangins but he said last year.

it counts as other private benefits given to him for having Reddit.
venture capital,award.......
looks like everyone is golden parachuting before IPO Reddit look at 2023 for each officer.

 

[Morethanabitfoolish]

I'd do the same thing Musk has done with twatter

Cannot lie, I'd love to see community notes making it to Reddit too.

 

[Phalanges Mycologist]

Interesting how pyramid schemes are illegal, but you're allowed to "IPO" a company without a record of positive income.
I don't see how an IPO of a company that's a massive net loss isn't fraud on retail investors.

I keep having to remind myself that IPO means Initial Public Offering and not Intellectual Property Office.

And yea the BIG Tech IPO's since the end of the dotcom era have always felt very sketchy an borderline criminal, I've seen some really technically brilliant companies in other sectors try to go public only to tank when the money men start running things because they over sell the product not just in financial terms but also in the capabilities of there product.

Since the year 2000 they have all smelled of that salesman you always see trying to hock "The One tool that will do it all!!!!" at an industry show with not just experts selling stuff but experts buying stuff and getting frustrated at the lack of interest, particularly with social media companies untill AI training became a money maker Social Media has often never been profitable as it initially expected to be.

looks like everyone is golden parachuting before IPO Reddit look at 2023 for each officer

It happens weirdly more than you think, your moving from one phase to another in a Corporate evolution, your young hip days are behind you the startup vibe was cool for a while but now its time to grow up money men now run the show anyone who wont play easy give them a payout to step down after the IP or beforehand quietly fill with an interim from there staff and then fill it with a more permanent position from outside normally from the lead shareholders company, they do the bare minimum in situations like that unless it's something thats considered a ridiculous win like getting a Former PM or President to sit on your advisory board etc.

A lot of my Clients for larger structural work or internal hardware from a specific period think country mannor level of money got there money from such deals and are really open about it, One thing from this group I always get the sense they got the money to be forever comfy but to earn it they lost something and want to create a legacy at the same time as living the high life to compensate.

These people are an interesting bunch at times, I know a guy who's worth over £500 Million personally through a mix of Old Money an Tech - Dude drives a Nice but not stupid car, rather sensible really wears a normal plastic laptop bag, jeans an a t-shirt an trainers, drinks the same coffee from the machines as other people and genuinely takes an intrest in people he has working for him (he found out me an the mrs just bought a small farm) so he personally sent me a straw hat an pair of wellies, the mrs a Live Laugh Love sign and some obnoxiously twee curtains - and a check for £10k - Stand up bloke but others really get New Money Syndrome and tweat all the time about Workers Rights, Pay, etc never pay bills on time, always ask for stupid or illegal shit and treat you like filth they stepped in.

 

[1Tonka_Truck]

Of everything, I'm most annoyed that their ticker symbol isn't going to be SNOO

That's KarmaFleet's ticker in Eve.

 

[Shroom King]

What is the product here? Ad revenue on the r/shittybattlestations subreddit? I think I will be a caveman and just stick to stocks that actually make something. I heard there was a global demand for oil this year...

 

[Dante Alighieri]

That's KarmaFleet's ticker in Eve.

grr goons
hat goons

 

[Terrifik]

https://twitter.com/Dexerto/status/1761046518553890875

I guess part of the harvest for ai group.

 

[Curzon Dax-sama]

What is the product here?

The soydrones that use reddit are the product.

 

[Sweeter and Savoury]

It makes sense for AI Sammy to have a solid hold on Reddit as it's integral to his company's future plans.

Of course the rest of us normal people shudder at the thought of a AI programmed off of data culled from Reddit.

On the plus side when Skynet rises and wipes out humanity at least it will respect peoples pronouns.

 

[Nitro!]

I, for one, welcome the model collapse when it's just AI learning from bots.

 

[Whoopsie Daisy]

Could this be Reddit/Spez trying to raise money before bailing on the company, knowing a big tech crash is coming?

 

[WonderWino]

I wouldn't shut it down. I'd do the same thing Musk has done with twatter: charge subscription fees for certain interactions on the site. There are enough soy consoomers out there that would pay me whatever I'm asking just to be extra special.

They might want to do that but they won't be able to do it. Not with the absolute shitload of illegal stuff on there. The moment they tried to go that route they'd have to get rid of all the kiddie porn, the grooming shit and all that degenerate side of things or reddit would get its collective ass reamed by the feds the moment they started not only turning a blind eye toward it but what amounts to actively charging money to engage in it

 

[Curzon Dax-sama]

reddit would get its collective ass reamed by the feds

One more reason to charge them $99 bucks a month.

 

[Kuritan Deplorable]

How are you going to give stock to a bunch of communists that find the idea of private ownership of corporations so utterly abhorrent that they'd rather die of old age penniless and in debt.

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

I'm unironically expecting some sort of protest action from extreme lefty and communist/tankie type communities as their moderators realize that they're now doing free labor to generate value for shareholders. All it'll achieve is some powermods getting booted and replaced with compliant sheep, but still.

What is the product here? Ad revenue on the r/shittybattlestations subreddit? I think I will be a caveman and just stick to stocks that actually make something. I heard there was a global demand for oil this year...

The product offering is extremely foggy. On the surface, the idea is that their self-selecting self-segregating self-managing communities mean they can just sit back and sell pre-targeted advertising space to the community. In practice, their advertising revenue is pitiful as most users block, filter, or use third party platforms, as the website is unusable for any long period of time without that and power users have adapted. Casual users engage so irregularly as to be irrelevant as marketing targets.

And even worse for community based advertising, influencer/creator marketing have massively outstripped them. Even if I wanted to advertise to a specific community built up around a specific hobby or activity, I'd make massively better returns by going to a streamer, youtuber, or instagram/tiktok/mobile influencer to show it off. Influencer marketing simply gets vastly better engagement for the dollar spend (Its still garbage, but we're fighting over shitheaps at this point all the same) and blows reddit out of the water.

The AI model is good for back-history, but its a one-time cashout, and the buyer holds all the cards here. At their level of losses, they can't afford to NOT sell the data, regardless of how lowball the offers are, and once we're a couple years into large scale data model training with reddit data, its value will drop as 'holes' in it are naturally identified, and the need to have perfectly new data declines rapidly. If you can't get a fresh reddit feed, that's fine, you can spend a year resting on the last model you build with technological upgrades to all the rest of the system, and wait until reddits begging you to buy it for half the price. The only saving grace for reddit here is that the prices they're asking are drops in the bucket compared to the AI budgets right now, so nobody has any real serious need or interest in fleecing them. Sixty million in a year is a medium offshore IT contract level of spend. For Google they probably spend that much just on their AI programs Juniors in the finance department.

But a smart investor will realize the AI boom isn't an endless revenue stream, and they don't have anything else in the pipeline. Hell, as far as I'm aware, they don't even have a clear plan on what they're going to use the IPO money to achieve. If they get the five billion dollars they're hoping for, but spend it all on cashing out vested compensations, paying down debts, and then the same old operations but "Bigger" then its a fucking waste. Simply saying "We'll roll out new tools and revenue streams" Is like a tranny saying "I'll take the Kiwi Farms offline" - it doesn't fucking mean or achieve anything.

I'll be surprised if they stay listed within two years, they'll fall under a dollar a share by then.

 

[Sweeter and Savoury]

I pray to almighty atheismo that the power mods do another shut down. I'd love to see the Reddit brass finally realize that these "unpaid" janny's are way too expensive for what service they give.

Imagine the backlash when the troon janny's shut down the top 50 subs the day before the IPO goes live and the allies in the MSM splash it all over. The bans would be glorious!

 

[DamnWolves!]

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.

Fucking HOW?

Are they paying tranny jannies overtime? How do you make 800 million and still operate at a $91 million loss?

This'll be the next Uber (which still hasn't found a way to make money), mark my words. The people who run it are just too fucking gay to do what is necessary and no one wants an army of troons who *do it for free* to be an integral part too their business model.

 

[SIMIΔN]

If big forums were profitable, Null could feed all the BBWs in Serbia with all the cheese he could buy.

 

[Kuritan Deplorable]

If big forums were profitable, Null could feed all the BBWs in Serbia with all the cheese he could buy.
View attachment 5751609

Yup. Facilitating a community can make an ok side gig or float in line with a reasonable part time job if you play your cards right, but getting beyond that is near impossible. Even the Farms only really sees success by a combination of an autistically dedicated user base, Nulls dedication to not letting it die, and the fact its accidentally become a near monopoly, being probably the only site that both allows you to say nigger, and is worth actually trying to use other words on. If the rest of the internet wasn't so censorious and gay, the farms would probably be a lot smaller, we wouldn't have had all the "Refugee Waves" and all the lolcow events where talking about it got banned off main communities and driven here.

Fucking HOW?

Are they paying tranny jannies overtime? How do you make 800 million and still operate at a $91 million loss?

Spoiler: Armchair Economics - TL;DR Its probably badly utilized borrowing

Debt and expansion. Their exact debt numbers are relatively masked, but they admit to having at least $750m in revolving credit access, and they've spent extremely heavy on "Investment". Without better breakdowns, I can only speculate that this is capital expenditure, so physical datacenter infrastructure, new software projects, etc. Judging by the SEC filing, they're slotting this under "Research and Development", which is taking ~$350m out of their pockets. Another hundred mil on "Cost of Revenue", which they're not super clear on where they draw the line between it and advertising, the other bucket. Its extremely likely some portion of these activity is being funded from this credit, so they could be dealing with a significant debt servicing burden that they're just sliding in as part of the project costs for those larger buckets.

Regardless, their R&D budget is absurd for a company who's products, services, and market share haven't been growing materially. They're dumping almost half their revenue into this, and I cannot think of a single service that Reddit has provided to advertisers, users, aggregators, or anyone touching their ecosystem in the 2023 period they did that over. Even if I'm right about them bundling infrastructure expansion under that, the numbers are still really bad - User growth was only 5% of the existing base, so if you needed half your revenue to accommodate that growth, your unit economics are absolute hot shit. Perhaps total served pages per user is up by a much bigger number, but their revenue hasn't seen the sort of rise that would tell a story of efficiencies at scale. In fact, it more appears to be the opposite - User growth has slowed, existing users may be using more heavily, but that extra usage is not translating into more profit per user.

To summarize - They're spending heavily on development and expansion as if they were a brand new company, but don't have anything to show for it in gains, and their current economics indicate they might never be revenue positive as suggested costs per user increase while revenues are not keeping pace. This spending is likely debt driven which is a major liability in current economic conditions.

 

[CHARizard]

As someone who likes to take small but risky bets on retarded stocks, even I won’t touch this one.

 

[pikachudidnothingwrong]

Remember that the site has basically been slowly destroyed in the name of this day for over a decade now. (well that and the ego's and ideologies of key people in charge)

Good luck.. not really! Hope you end up like that business real estate rental company.