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)

 

[Halfnium Bomb]

I'm just a regular citizen with no real experience of share dealing and all that. But it seems I have about two weeks to learn how to short stocks.

Don't short, buy out-of-the-money puts with a few months till expiration. Options are contracts to buy stock at a fixed price, and offer both leverage and a limited downside risk (you only lose what you put in, shorting can have you losing more than you have if the price moons). Robinhood will take you in if no respectable broker will, but do try some real brokerages first.
The option will have a set of "Greeks" that indicate it's behavior. Delta is both how likely the option is estimated to be valuable at expiration, plus a measure of how much the option moves with respect to movements in the underlying.Stock Price * Option Delta / Option Price = Leverage. Leverage is good and how you make big numbers from small numbers. Closer expiration or further OTM usually means bigger leverage. Gamma is the rate of change of Delta.
Bear in mind the option value erodes every day to "Theta". nonlinearly, with the amount it loses daily increasing at the option approaches expiration.

I would not touch this, looks like something we're retail investors can get burned badly

But it'll be really fucking funny.

 

[WelperHelper99]

I'm expecting it to be hard-to-borrow for retail for quite some time. Probably until the VCs have dumped all their shares lmao.

Most likely. They don't want to be shorted out of the gate.

 

[Sargon's wife's son]

Just out of curiosity, what is the prevailing theory as to why the government came down hard on him? 35 years for academic journals does sound insane. I meant to go down that rabbit hole a while back, but I'll admit it was very convoluted and I didn't really get a clear picture.

Is it as simple as the government not wanting academia to be open source, or is there something I'm missing?

Can't have principled left Libertarians running social media sites who won't get ban happy when people start spreading information the government does not like

 

[Yeeted Teet]

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.

There was some sub that decided to autoban everyone who posted in r/teenagers, with the ban message just saying it was because the user was underage, and got a bunch of replies complaining that there had been a mistake and the user was really 30-60 years old.

 

[Zoobles]

I'll buy $20 for speculation when it is less than a dollar a share on the OTC market in a couple years

 

[Tanner Glass]

The same was said about YouTube, though. People assumed after Google bought them and they caved to advertising that the platform would die. However, that clearly wasn't the case and hasn't been the case for the last two decades. Reddit could go the same way. It'll bring on the advertising, people will bitch and complain about ads, about moderation, etc. but may eventually settle in for the long haul.

Google already had a business plan in place, though. They had the infrastructure, the hardware, the networking, the piles of money to keep it floating forever, the everything. It's also a business model that is currently successful only if you're a huge company that owns large server farms/internet infrastructure (like Google/Youtube and and Amazon/Twitch) so it's not like Google has to worry about anyone encroaching on their business.

The platform can't really die (although it's caved to advertisers many, many times over) just because there isn't an alternative. If video hosting were cheaper, YT would have died long ago.

I would like to hear an actual answer to this if possible.

Money used to be a lot easier to come by (tons of money for VCs, low interest loans, etc) in the previous economy so paying a CEO a gigantic pile of money to build a huge company that would generate a huge ROI. It was very common for companies to get spun up, bought for some outrageous sum of money in a few years, then everyone just does it again.

Tumblr for example was sold for $1.1 Billion and Reddit was valued at 10 Billion as of 2017. The CEO of a 10 Billion dollar company making 200million/year isn't unheard of - even if the company doesn't make money or have a business plan. Those days are coming to a screeching halt - which is likely why Reddit's current owners are scrambling for an IPO.

 

[ovenmath]

Reddit is useful when you're trying to look up information on some non-political topic, so expect them to get rid of things like r/piracy and r/emulation soon. I wouldn't be surprised if they put old threads behind a pay wall so that they can monetize people that put "reddit" at the beginning of a search result since the search engines are so fucked.

fuck, you're right. There goes 90% of the reasons I ever visit reddit. Time to bookmark the rom megathread drive links I suppose.

 

[Anonymus Fluhre]

Now I like to be pretty loose with my investments into company but I'm not stupid enough to put my money into them. I may have helped Null with the lawsuit by sending him some bennies his way so he can take it to the Man and donated money to his stream because he can make a funny sometimes, but there's no way I'd give money to a place that actively wants to ruin me and my families lives

It would only take one little fuck up to crash their stock price and you'd only have their jannies to blame.


Personally, this feels like they're doing this to gauge interest in a sale and to make sure its more than what the company is valued at.

 

[Cheeseknife]

How is that at all an equivalent comparison?

It isn't a comparison. The point is the website has a greater than zero value and an active user base. This is the opposite of dead.

 

[Thumb Butler]

All is not lost. /r/TransGooned is still up and has 61.9k members. Reddit will never delete this important space.

 

[Obi Wan Kenobi]

>by nuking r/GOONED and asking jannies to buy stock
This is the funniest thing I've ever seen related to reddit aside from that rape fetish subreddit going private(?) in protest of either the Ukraine War or Roe v Wade
edit: they might aswell ban those fucking perverts too while they're at it

 

[WickyWickyWoW]

The same was said about YouTube, though. People assumed after Google bought them and they caved to advertising that the platform would die. However, that clearly wasn't the case and hasn't been the case for the last two decades. Reddit could go the same way. It'll bring on the advertising, people will bitch and complain about ads, about moderation, etc. but may eventually settle in for the long haul.

After the purchase google maintained a fairly relaxed and borderline libertarian attitude towards managing youtube for a long time, it wasnt until post 2016 when big tech after having consolidated most of the internet for a solid amount of time at that point had started to rev up the censorship engine and began converting the web into a niggercattle plantation, youtube was hit in this aswell with the adpocalypse when it became clear there wasnt a viable alternative for people to flee to, as @Tanner Glass glass said google had the immense infrastructure needed to effectively run youtube when they bought it. IIRC a bigwhig at youtube/google (wojcicki?) said they wanted to make youtube the same as cable TV, and by god they did exactly that. Ignoring anything politically related youtube content has become sterile, dull, safe, and utterly drab. The algorithm pushes the most "acceptable" slop while burying actual original and creative content and punishes creators who step out of line by screwing with their ad revenue, They turned youtube into the same style of niggercattle plantation that TV is. The network effect being a motherfucker, sheer reputation instilling in normal people there is only youtube, and the extreme cost of running a video playback site essentially has made youtube a concrete video site now that isnt going away any time soon.

Reddit on the other hand may as well be poisoned for the massive multitude of reasons discussed in this thread, Something I have been curious about, if reddit gets tumblred what will happen to the hobby/interest/tech support subs. Reddit in fashion of the consolidation of the internet has supplanted the hobby/interest forum and replaced it with a subreddit. I do wonder what will happen to them, I do doubt though reddit will get completely merked only due to its extremely massive presence that it has, another question is where specifically will the degenerates flee too?

 

[Deez Nuts]

That one weirdo who mods like half the subs on reddit must be very happy.

 

[KingLiberty76]

The big question is... what about the porn. I don't think it's monetized and it has to contribute to a ton of their bandwidth and storage costs. As well as a bunch of lawyer and admin costs for complaints.

the moment they try to ban porn is the moment reddit dies because every single redditor is obsessed with porn and will write paragraphs the about the net benefits of porn addiction

 

[Anonymus Fluhre]

I don't seem to see their S-1 in that article so here it is for people to read.
In an S-1 for those who don't know, they tell you what could affect the company like natural disasters and little growth, to something Reddit would have an issue with, bad press.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1713445/000162828024006294/reddits-1q423.htm

 

[Rick The Stick]

Redditors seething about this brings me joy. Have fun spending the rest of your free time on a bot-infested, corporate propaganda machine!

Isn't that exactly what it's been for the last few years anyway?

 

[ChefKiss]

the time to IPO it was a decade ago, after what happened with tumblr it was clear appealing to the woke was a fatal plan and if you didnt know then you should certainly know now with what happened with budweiser and woke hollywood blockbusters

 

[thegrayman]

I am so looking forward to Reddit moderators learning that not even spending their chicken nuggets money on stocks will give them substantial power. Very much looking forward to the coping with "I am a moderator of this subreddit and an owner of the company. Therefore I am better than you."

 

[Absurdist Laughter]

youtube the same as cable TV, and by god they did exactly that. Ignoring anything politically related youtube content has become sterile, dull, safe, and utterly drab

I agree with you, however, I wonder how much weight has to be pushed on the content creators. A lot of YouTubers use the site for their main source of income and do not have anything to back it up. Someone like Null could have a YouTube channel for MATI, if it weren't for a select few jannies complaining and reporting, without censoring himself. Yeah, he'd probably be shadow banned and forget monetization, but he'd still get his videos out. I think YouTube creators need to bring back old school style YouTubing where it was common to have people working one job and posting videos at the same time. I blame, at least part of, the corporatization of the Internet on content creators allowing themselves to be held hostage by finances.

Edit:
I forgot about the Twitch/Youtube crossover content that is fairly regular now a day. I still wouldn't count Twitch as a separate form of income in this scenario as it is in they are in the same industry sectors; Entertainment.

 

[Nobunaga]

Fuck, can't wait until they ban the contraband sneaker/replicas subreddits to see black people chimp out once more