If the market for initial public offerings recovers in the new year, one company that aims to go public early on is Reddit. An IPO will put the spotlight on the prospects for Reddit’s advertising business, which has fallen short of ambitious growth targetsoutlined by executives two years ago. ...
Well shucks, all they did was drive out their most active content makers and cut themselves off from hundreds of thousands of dollars in free moderation labor. Who could possibly have seen this coming?
Reddit's value as a social media platform drops as it's value to advertisers rises. The karma system is democratic, the userbase shapes the visual content on the site, that's was makes it useful. The more mutilated it becomes in service of extracting money from advertising, the less genuine it is, and the less people will seek to use it.
Spez would like to believe Reddit is a cow that can be milked forever.
In reality Reddit is a pig that Spez seems to believe he can get bacon from forever. Except to get that bacon, you have to kill it, and you can only do that once.
Well yeah, I'm probably not the only daily active user who stopped visiting all together... after 10+ years of daily active use. They brought this on themselves.
I've made over 1000 comments here, 600 posts, and somehow become the moderator of two communities. It wasn't all to spite reddit, but it is a welcome fringe benefit.
Let's for a second take stock of what's happening here.
The ad revenue is falling short of the projected prediction of what it was supposed to be. As in the profit from ad revenue did not reach that arbitrary number.
Reddit is still grossly profitable.
This is the same kind of headline that says Facebook lost 11 bagillion dollars but in reality they didn't lose a dime they just didn't make as much as they wanted to.
Remember, the reason I ditched Reddit wasn't the ads per se, it was the constant data selling, and the official app just getting worse and worse with unwanted "features" pushed on everyone. They kept getting greedier and greedier so when they disabled 3rd party apps I ditched Reddit.
It's such bullshit, Reddit could have been so much more. Researching my latest purchase/obsession, and the only way to find anything that isn't corporate sponsored reviews or AI content farming is to add the word "Reddit" to the end of the search.
As someone with an 11 year old account that I deleted during the TPA debacle, I fully recognise that there's a huge problem here. Reddit created a place where people wanted to put their thoughts, ideas, and opinions, and now that they are cashing out TOO FUCKING BAD LAME EBD USER.
Edit: /oblig fuck you spez. Slimy little arsehole sold everyone out and thinks he deserves to be rich because his shitty site isn't absolutely irredeemable.
The last time I have logged in to Reddit was the day they ended the apps, July 1 I think it was. I haven't been back since. I thought I would miss it more than I do but honestly I never even think about it anymore and am much happier with my new Lemmy life.
I don't know if reddit ads provide a good roas. We tried a few campaigns and gave up because it was so far off what we see on other platforms. The community is super anti-advertising, the targeting is really limited by community and geo.
People go to reddit to veg out, not to shop. I think the only times I've made purchases based on things I've seen are when there's a discussion and numerous people make a recommendation for the same thing, or maybe a few cases when the op is showcasing something they had a personal part in creating.
So they did $800M when they wanted to do $1B. Okay that’s disappointing.
But the eye opener for me in this article is that they did $800M in 2023 up from $350M in 2021. That’s insane revenue growth. This is the first time I’ve seen any inkling that their IPO might have some chance.
Still, you’d have to believe they can get to multiple billions. I think it’s much more likely that they will fall flat and actually help kill whatever optimism there might be about IPOs in the market.
The users, and only users, need to be the shareholders. A bunch of useless venture capitalist parasites should never again be allowed to own and destroy our public spaces.
Anyone got the full article? Falling short of growth targets doesn't mean they made a negative. Hitting 4% growth instead of 5% is still pretty good for example.
Since there's a paywall, I can't see the whole article but does this imply there was still positive ad growth and they just missed their goal or there was no or negative ad growth?
The company I work for spends ads on social media companies for ransomware protection and regularly spend is regularly negative. That means we spend more money on advertising than we do in income. We only do it to maintain some market share but otherwise it's just a pure loss on that platform.
I wonder if this is the motivation behind removing the auth-gate on mobile. Previously, if I browsed the mobile site on my phone in a non-signed-in state (I deleted my account), I could view 5-8 top-level comments and that's it. Clicking "Show more comments" or trying to expand child comments would show a modal asking me to sign in or download the app.
That changed last week along with a complete rework of the mobile site. I'm betting that they saw a huge increase in unauthenticated mobile users with a far below-average time-on-site metric and decided to open it up.
Overall, I appreciate the change because I still lurk in many of the niche subs that I still haven't found a good replacement for. self-hosted, datahoarder, webdev, 3dprinting, et al. have analogs here, but the content isn't as deep.
Reddit is the most censored platform on the internet, who wants to use that? Before the API fallout, it was barely tolerable with the subreddit fiefdoms and the shitlords who ruled over them with a pudgy iron fist. To be honest I'm surprised it took so long to make an open source link aggregator since it sucked right after the ye olde digg debacle. "They're our enemies"