So it finally happened. Reddit filed its S-1 on Thursday, which means after something like a decade of "is Reddit going public or not" rumors, we actually have real paperwork to look at. I've had a Reddit account since 2012 (RIP my old username, lost it in a password manager incident I dont want to talk about), and reading through the filing felt a little like watching a weird uncle finally get a real job.
The numbers themselves are fine, not great. Reddit pulled in something like $804 million in revenue for 2023, up roughly 20% from the year before, and the net loss narrowed to around $90 million, down a lot from the year before that. So the company is still losing money, just losing it slower, which I guess is progress if you squint. Advertising is still the overwhelming majority of that revenue, which feels almost quaint in 2024 when every company wants to tell you its actually an AI company now.
And speaking of that: buried in there is a licensing deal with Google, reportedly worth something in the neighborhood of $60 million a year, to use Reddit posts and comments to train AI models. Which, sure, fine, thats the business now. But it does put a funny spin on every argument thread youve ever lost on r/AmITheAsshole. Somewhere your unhinged 2 a.m. comment defending yourself over a parking spot dispute might be quietly shaping how a chatbot understands human conflict. Im not mad about it exactly. Its just funny.
The part actually worth talking about though is the directed share program. Reddit is setting aside a chunk of shares specifically so eligible users and moderators can buy in at the IPO price, before the stock starts trading on the open market. Not employees, not friends and family in the traditional sense, actual randos who've spent years modding a subreddit about, I dont know, vintage lawnmowers or whatever, for free, with zero equity, and now might get first crack at buying stock in the company whose forums they've been unpaid janitors for.
Im genuinely torn on this. Part of me thinks its a nice gesture, a real acknowledgment that Reddit as a product is built almost entirely on labor nobody gets paid for. The other part of me has read enough about how "let the little guy buy in on IPO day" programs tend to go (see: pretty much every retail-investor IPO hype cycle) that I'm skeptical it ends well for the people taking Reddit up on it. IPO-day pops are unpredictable, and a lot of these directed share programs end up as a nice headline more than a nice return. I dont know if I qualify yet — I think you need some minimum karma and account age, and I havent dug into the exact cutoffs — but even if I do, I'm not sure I'm putting real money into it. I like Reddit. I do not necessarily trust Reddit's finances with my rent money.
One other small thing from this week worth a mention: Stability AI put out word on Stable Diffusion 3, still just a research preview with a waitlist, nothing you can actually run yet. After the mess a certain other company's image generator has been dealing with the last couple days (you know the one, I'm not wading into it here, every tech site on the internet already has), it's a little funny to see a new image model announced quietly in the same week and mostly get ignored because of it. Timing is everything.
Anyway. I'll probably check my Reddit account settings later tonight just to see if 12 years and an unreasonable amount of time spent on r/houseplants counts for anything. If it does, I still might not buy in. But I want the option, mostly out of spite.