[Reuters BreakingViews] Investors will say “OK Boomer” to aging Reddit
[Reuters BreakingViews] Investors will say “OK Boomer” to aging Reddit
[...] a dearth of profit this late into its existence portends the lack of a real business model, suggesting it’s still not ready for public company life.
How the fuck are you not making a profit on $800M annual revenue? Just how much is Spez salary?
That's actually the thing that gets me about this whole situation. They don't create the communities. They don't create the content. They don't add comments. They don't upvote or downvote content or comments. They don't moderate their communities. They don't really respond to support tickets, and rely on other users to help others out. That's a lot people they don't have to pay.
Imgur was created because reddit refused to host native images. They refused to host native video. If you change or delete something, they only keep one version as backup. The vast majority of their content is text. Their storage and bandwidth needs should be comparatively minimal.
They've spent decades refusing to upgrade the user experience: RES has all the features reddit refused to make. The moderator toolbox has all the moderator tools reddit refused to make. The apps have all the features and all the disability features reddit refused to make. Their own app is something they bought from the original developer for a minimal amount of money - and then they made it worse.
What are they spending their money on? Reddit crypto was a failure. Reddit NFTs were a failure. Reddit streaming events (RPAN) was a failure. I'm sure they invest money into their April Fool's thing, but how much does that really cost?
With most of the labor unpaid mods!
Mods, and people posting too. At least Facebook and Twitter have network effects of people you know or want to follow. Reddit doesn't even have that.
Don't forget that users paid the server fees, for literally years.
Never trust a c corp in good faith.
They've tried to implement features people didn't want and haven't seemed to develop a decent business model going forward. Even worse, they destroyed two of the better ways of generating revenue; profit sharing from phone apps and Reddit Gold.
It's probably hosting costs. Reddit uses huge amounts of bandwidth and storage
They made a video and picture hosting platform that no one asked for or wanted that likely balloons their infrastructure cost by an order of magnitude.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Reddit waited out the near-zero percent interest that persisted for over a decade and are now finally pulling the trigger on the IPO with interest rates sky high and investors skittish. The punchline is that the Fed is about to lower rates over the next year, which will make speculative investments more attractive again. They delayed all this time and destroyed the site with all their for-profit changes only to go forward on the IPO at the worst possible time.
So, Reddit's standard level of competence.
Wow, they really spezzed up.
Thanks for sharing.
But investors then will be buying Reddit on a leap of faith, rather than old-fashioned discipline.
Hopefully they won't
I don’t know many investors but the ones I do know would never take a leap of faith like this. This is almost guaranteed money loss. Maybe Steve is fighting against the 1% in his own way. God bless you Huffman, god bless you.
He wants the money for his doomsday bunker.
It wouldn't surprise me if Reddit's own popular investment sub changes their stance on short selling for this one stock. I'm not sure what it's been like since the exodusish, but when I was still on there the Reddit IPO was treated as a joke.
This is going to be like Robinhood all over again. It's going to go public. It's going to shoot up in valuation, insiders are going to sell, and then it's going to crash back down.
That's almost every tech company. IPOs are designed to make the rich richer. They get early access which drives sales, others buy into the hype, and the early access people cash out.
The IPO is the venture capital selling their stake to the public. The private investor who footed the bill makes all the money while the person who had the idea and built the product gets whatever the VC let's them have. An IPO is simply the rich people selling when they have a minimum viable product with a financial return model that isn't net negative. They don't care about their investment, just the return.
then it will go back up because people are too fucking lazy to leave a predatory piece of shit product even if they know better.
IPO being a disaster is pretty much a given, but does anyone else feel like that headline was a disaster too?
As someone who had to make headlines for a while: yes. This says absolutely nothing and only serves to confuse. A good headline informs and sparks interest. This does the exact opposite of both lol
I feel like I would've been interested in shares when the company had good PR... I like the stock etc. Now I'm just rooting for it to fail.
Reddit is the biggest grift known to humankind by sheer volume. They do nothing but dev work and that all falls on how to serve ads and not break the free moderating, posting, and commenting.
Fuck Reddit I hope it becomes Deaddit.
Catholic church might have something to say about yhe title of biggest
Reddit gold as a plenary indulgence XD
I’m gonna short this like a mother and make a bundle.