I work in financial reporting, so I have a decent idea of what makes up things like operating profit/loss and Adjusted EBITDA.
This does not look good for Reddit and if the company only managed a $90.8m loss after jacking up API costs, nuking virtually every third-party client, backstabbing every power mod, giving alternatives like Lemmy and Kbin an actual user base and selling off user data to Google, then I fully expect things to get a lot worse on the site.
I don’t know how in the hell they let it go as wrong as they did. They had all the eyeballs of the internet. They had all the Google search traffic. They had an API that encouraged tons of other people to make applications that link with them to display their content.
All they had to do was light touch monetization, and slightly stroke the egos of the mods. Every new phone, car, light bulb that ever came out had a place where it could be directed right at the people they want to sell it to. All they had to do was disguise it as an unboxing or a slightly pithy review. Hell, they could have gotten competitors to bid against each other. Chevy could have been on there dissing forward, Ford could have been on their dissing Dodge. They’re so many opportunities there for monetization. They have control over their own algorithm.
You’re totally forgetting the part where from the very top down that company is run by total fuckwads.
They’ve fucked up at every single step and remained utterly self righteous throughout.
No, that would give them some of the money, but they want all of the money.
Seeing a report like that, that they did all these things to raise funds and are still not profitable, is there any reason why anyone would invest? Surely the price can only go down from initial offering, right? Unless the price started very low.
People who invest are betting that the problems can be solved by a new team or when the company is sold to Facebook.
Imagine thinking that about a company that isn’t even doing remotely as well as Lycos.
That’s right, it still exists and unlike reddit it’s profitable.
it still exists
Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a loooong time.
Lycos isn’t even a particularly bad search engine. It’s just been overshadowed by bigger players like Google, Bing, Baidu, DDG, Yandex, etc. I imagine that their low traffic helps to lower their operating costs a lot.
One would imagine the chief asshole would reduce his 190m payday by 100m to make the balance beautiful before an IPO.
He doesn’t care about the ipo, or reddit, its employees, its “partners”, or anyone who uses the site. He wants money now, and like a house fly he’s not capable of learning.
That’s the first time I’ve heard that analogy and I love it
Why do that when he can golden parachute instead?
Profitable businesses have to pay taxes
I don’t work in financial reporting, and I have no clue what even EBITDA is…
But even me, I come to the same conclusion!^^
Earnings before interest, taxation, deprecation and amortisation. Interest is classed as other income and taxation is kinda self-explanatory.
Depreciation is spreading the cost of a fixed asset over the course of its useful life. So let’s say you spend $40,000 on a machine that you expect to keep for 20 years, and scrap for $1,000 at the end of its expected life. You depreciate it on the straight-line basis (meaning it goes down by a fixed amount each financial year, or depreciate it by $1,950 each year. Straight-line isn’t the only form of depreciation. Cars for example go down on a reducing balance basis, meaning their value goes down by a lot more during the early years of their lifespan.
Amortisation is like depreciation, but for long term loans and intangible assets (things like customer lists, patents, etc.)
Thank you very much for the great explanation, I learned a lot.
Sorry, I don’t work in economics so I don’t follow this (but it looks like a great analysis for someone who doesn’t understand it!).
Do all these things mean Reddit IPO is likely to tank (though one never knows)?
I’d like Spez to pay for all he’s done to 3rd party apps and driving mods (and us users) away, but in the end I’m afraid it’s only going to be regular employees to feel the pinch and Spez just cashing out…
Also, Reddit has a ton of users and some other article these days said they’re going to sell everything to AI services that are going to train themselves on Reddit for a lot of dollars. Would this be enough to keep them afloat?
I’m dumb, how is this different from gross profits?
If i’m not mistaken (not an accountant but did do the accounts of a tiny company at one point) Interest, Depreciation and Amortization go into the calculation of gross (i.e. before tax) profits, unlike with EBITDA
EBITDA is used moreso in internal quarterly and monthly management accounts, which don’t follow the exact same structure as an annual report which companies have to publish annually by law and follow GAAP and IFRS guidelinss when preparing.
You know the very credible sounding theory that Musk bought Twitter to drown it. He used Middle Eastern funds etc. and those people owning these gigantic funds had nightmares because Twitter made it so easy to organise mass unrest. I want to believe this crazy sounding theory since other option would be someone having such a capital, know how and influence is that dumb.
What if this is just a plot to kill Reddit? While crypto bros polluted it a lot, it was very similar with Twitter. Freedom of speech, diversity. It may have bugged people.
Why don’t company’s pay their CEOs in exposure and sense of pride? If it’s good enough for moderators and artists it should be good for CEOs.
There are 54 pages of risk factors, which, after reading many S-1 filings over the years, seems pretty long. One of the most notable is the sentence, “We have incurred substantial losses during our history and may never achieve profitability.”
Well that doesn’t sound very promising for them.
may never achieve profitability.
I’m not an expert or anything, but that doesn’t sound like a very good investment.
You could short it…
My understanding is on these fillings you’re supposed to give a full accounting of all the risks so investors can’t sue you later. It’s like going for surgery where they say you could die - not saying it’s likely, but tries to get them off the hook.
This does not stop companies being successful in IPOs and giving share holders lucrative gains. Take Atlassian as an example of a company seen as successful but is not profitable.
Atlassian has not yet posted a full-year profit in its 20+ years
What does that mean? Who pays the shortfalls?
I am not a CFO but I believe essentially by eating into cash reserves and accumulating debt. Also there is some wizardry when you work out operating profit / EBIT.
Someone more financially competent may want to offer a more accurate answer.
Why would anyone give money to a business who has never ran in the black after 20 years? Just set your money on fire instead
Dumb people are going to see headlines about “AI” and “the first social media IPO in a long time,” and they’re going fork over money. Also speculators are going to buy after they speculate that other speculators are going to buy speculatively.
Yeah, this IPO will probably go just fine and a bunch of wankers will make a bunch of money. That’s what it’s all about, after all.
And where does that money come from?
Honest question, I hate finances.
Mostly from small people either tricked into buying the "new bitcoin/Nvidia/apple/… before it’s to late or dumb people hyped by other dumb people into buying it. And if enough small people invested and the stock rises the big player collect the profit.
Yeah that was my expectation … Thanks for the explanation
Wait for dat citation… before accepting that rationalization
Yea, no I don’t have time for anything besides confirmation bias
And thats why theyre trying to sucker the users themselves to invest first, so they can pump and dump.
Wouldn’t be surprised if they manipulated the discussion around the stock as well. Bot army or admin downvotes on critical discussions, and lots of upvotes on the hype.
Twitter silently backing into the bushes
Hey, I think Twitter made money at least one year of their operations.
Better, buy a lottery ticket with it. That way it might be worth as much as the ash you’d have anyway, but there’s a chance you’ll become a millionaire.
Or Bitcoin, but fair warning: you might find yourself tempted to start a rap career, and that’s almost never advisable.
Hope springs eternal
Lots of losses but still paid spez a cool $193 million.
Iirc it was $600k as actual payroll, the rest in private stock. But still, fuck the greedy little pig boy.
That 192M in private stock gonna be 192K soon
Yup, ain’t that some shit
Better yet, don’t fuck him.
Spez wouldn’t be into it anyway since I’m not a 15 year old girl.
True. Dude also looks like a textbook example of someone who would get their lunch money stolen.
We can get him a “present” as a “congratulatory” gesture on his ipo
For being a complete douche.
Whole thing is sketchy AF. I hope very few of its selected users falls for the scam invitation to buy early shares. They’re not only exploiting them for free content and free moderation, they want them to help pay for Spez’s ludicrous compensation.
When it comes to the inevitable Renaissance and guillotines, I just hope spez is close to the front of the line.
This post will probably get automoderated to suicidesville. It’s sensitive to the fally blade decapitator thingy.
Every photo I’ve seen of Spez looks like a real life trollface.
I’ve known about shorting for a while but this might actually push me into learning the ins and outs of how. Because it would be nice to profit off this goin tits up.
Don’t worry, the IPO will not stop the losses. It will just provide a pool for more bonus payments for the management.
Rest in pieces. Federated pieces.
I am curious. If you were a Chief officer or VP or something. What kind of changes would you do to make it profitable? Reduce server count? Roll back old.reddit? Just cut overhead? Get rid of Spez? How can they possibly make it profitable given where they are now?
The premise of the question is flawed in my opinion. It only needs to be profitable because they put themselves in that situation by going public.
A social platform run by users should only need to break even. I have no idea why a web forum needs to be on the stock market.
Now it’s another example of Enshittification of the internet.
That’s why I said given where they are now, how would it even be possible. What can they do outside of raise prices of reddit stickers or ad-free reddit.
Yeah that’s fair.
Merchandising is the only palatable idea I can think of.
More likely to happen:
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Twitter’s verified user subscription strategy
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More ad posts with paid-priority (priority hidden from users)
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Layoffs with AI as miracle cure
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Selling user data for AI training (check)
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Paid API access (check)
But it’s really hard to ignore that its function isn’t really designed for profit and it’s wacky that we have to humor the idea.
Ironically, if they charged moderators to be moderators, theyd probably pay for it. Some of those people were nuts.
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And not follow the quest for unending profit no matter the consequences? That sounds like some socialism shit /s
It needs to become profitable because it was unprofitable for 20 years. Would you dump millions into something that doesn’t even have the chance to make you money in the first place? Reddit wouldn’t even exist anymore.
There has never been a profitable social media company.
Facebook might have started out as a social media company, but it’s only profitable now because it’s part of an advertising duopoly that has almost all online ads completely locked up. Their actual business is renting eyeballs to advertisers. The social media part of it is just data collection for their advertising.
Reddit can’t compete with the big 2 as an ad platform. They don’t have the reach of the other two, and never will. So, it’s not going to be a good money making platform, but it might be able to have a niche and cover its costs. There are ways it could do that and not be awful for users.
They could partner with Hollywood studios to promote shows and movies, provide forums to discuss them that are safe for those brands. They could work with local governments to be a place to release important information. Governments used to do that on Twitter, but Twitter has gone to shit. This isn’t stuff that will send Reddit shares to the moon like their VC backers want. But, it could survive.
Instead, they’re going to follow the Elon Musk playbook and it will die.
AMA used to be a pretty big draw for lots of people who didn’t regularly use the site and often made international news, but they fucked that right up.
Yeah. You could see they were coordinating with the agents of celebrities. The celebs found it more interesting than the generic interviews they did with other media outlets. Upvoting and downvoting meant the best questions bubbled up to the top, although sometimes they were things the celebs didn’t want to talk about. But, with a good PR person in the room they did fine with it.
There’s a niche there, but it isn’t going to be a humongous one that will make Reddit a trillion dollar business.
Yep. Everyone thinks they are entitled to be Zuckerberg. Only one entitled person got away with it and he even stole the damned thing.
And, he only got away with it until he was able to pivot to advertising. Sure, small social media companies (even relatively large ones like Twitter) also want to sell ads, but the more user data you have, the more you can convince people that your ads are nearly mind control. Meta can do that because they control Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. They got all the users because the users were hooked before they started selling the ads, and now network effects mean they don’t want to leave.
All of that sucks in user data which they can then sell ads against. Reddit would just be one text-based ad site where people use pseudonyms. It’s never going to be able to compete with Meta for ad dollars.
If reddit allowed third party apps again that would probably be enough to get me back. Maybe in another 5 years it won’t but right now Lemmy only wins cause the reddit app experience is bad enough to drive me away.
Yeah, turned out I was actually more loyal to the app I was using than I was to the platform. Though I was also pretty good to the platform, I contributed and interacted daily and often spent money buying gold. I tend to take the attitude that if I’m getting a lot of use out of something I don’t mind spending a little to support it. That’s all in the past now and I wonder how many other paying users they burned.
Reddits app was always bad. Even with all the hurdles and shitty stuff they do on mobile browser I still chose to be on browser
Boost for reddit was rhe only rzn I used reddit. But now, I switched over to tbis.
This seems tricky. If you see any ads in a 3rd party app, they’re going to support the developer instead of Reddit.
Cut my salary to only a silly amount like $200k/year.
Create paid accounts for like $5/year
Allow people to purchase annoyances/chaos like force non-members to use light mode only for a day.
Include bill-through services to grab a cut of any apps making money off the site.
Here’s what I’d do:
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VIP posts which you have to subscribe to a user to view. Reddit takes a cut of the subscription fee. With the sheer amount of OnlyFans models who astroturf the fuck out of the NSFW subs, it feels beyond stupid that Spez isn’t cutting out the middle man and competing with the likes of OF, Fansly, Patreon and Subscribestar.
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Add more incentives to subscribe to Reddit Premium, i.e. enhanced search functionality, the ability to time travel back to the frontpage from a previous date.
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Improve the official Reddit app to the point where it’s on-par with previous third party offerings.
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Bring back RPAN as a fully-fledged livestreaming platform with fewer restrictions. Introduce ads (Premium users get ad-free viewing) and revenue sharing for partnered creators.
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Change content and moderator guidelines to curb power users.
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Pivot towards short-form video content as a separate section of the site to compete with the likes of TikTok.
You are now hired as the post-IPO CEO
I agree with everything except 4 and 6
4 because video live streaming is stupid expensive. Twitch only survives cause they’re owed by Amazon who owns numerous data centers to support it. Same deal with yt.
6 because everyone’s already doing short form video and we don’t need another tiktok alternative. We already have Instagram and YouTube, and their server infrastructure likely far exceeds that of reddit.
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Make mods actually pay for the privilege of modding.
The corporations and political groups that employ them would pick up the tab.
We’ve all seen the news about spez salary, to yeah, fuck him and check if others are also getting such salaries.
Charge $1 month per account, $2 for access to NSFW subs.
It can’t because it’s actively hostile to the users that make it its content in favor of recreating a more massive version of the Stanford prison experiment. Although that seems to be a fad to the people naturally attracted to acting out their power fantasies in any sort of reddit-like social network, particularly those who want to act out Minority Report.
No matter what happens the CEO and his peers will get fat bonuses
Anyone else here concerned about what this means for the health of the ecosystem? If reddit was never sustainable and we are well and truly past a phase of consolidation there is potentially a lot of history / info to loose here. The damage has been done already by the funding model. While the return to federation and private hosting is nice, there is a potential “dark” age.
Can’t help but feel like we’re getting there already with most sites having the exact same problem. I think Facebook might be the only site that actually makes money due to always prioritising money, everyone else has dominated the market by operating at a loss for the past 2 decades and now suddenly oops we decided we need money.
I could see a Wikipedia-style donation model working to keep lots of different servers up. But I can’t see it happening for servers hosting exclusively news + memes + whatever random communities people want to add.
I _could _ see it happening for dedicated broad-topic or semi-niche instances (instances for gaming, investing, Linux, music production, etc.) each hosting a collection of related and maybe more niche communities (for CSGO, Bitcoin, Arch, EDM production).
As they become more popular, server hosting costs increase, and at some point they might need to ask for donations to keep afloat. People are willing to throw a little money towards something they enjoy, especially if it’s their choice to do so. And they feel good about it. And instances that stay around longer gain more users, more usability, more credibility (assuming a non-toxic community).
I could definitely see it leading down a path of growth and prosperity for the platform. However, now that I typed this out, I could see it both working positively, and being abused and exploited, so 🤷
I disagree that Reddit’s R&D spending is a lot. Look at any FAANG/FANGMAN/MAMMA company; their annual R&D spending is significantly higher.
