Reddit’s IPO Filing Shows Lots Of Losses After Nearly 20 Years

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 receiced one of those special offer emails to buy stocks on Monday. Weren't those supposed to go only to power users? I haven't done anything with my account since the API debacle and wasn't a power user before.

I feel like their rug pull before the ipo doesn't work that good. I hope the gme bros will short reddit to the ground, that would be the best end to Reddit I can imagine. Fuck spez.

Research and development, at $438.3 million

What in the fuck has Reddit developed in the last year that cost half a billion fucking dollars?

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.

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

Lots of losses but still paid spez a cool $193 million.

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.

In 2023, the company’s revenue was $804.0 million. Research and development, at $438.3 million, was more than half, an awfully big number for a company of this age.

What the heck are they doing‽

Edit: oops, Semi-Hemi-Demigod beat me to it. Hello, fellow binner!

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?

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.

I'm having fun watching it burn.

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.

I receiced one of those special offer emails to buy stocks on Monday. Weren't those supposed to go only to power users? I haven't done anything with my account since the API debacle and wasn't a power user before.

I feel like their rug pull before the ipo doesn't work that good. I hope the gme bros will short reddit to the ground, that would be the best end to Reddit I can imagine. Fuck spez.

The solution is clearly more NFTs. People really love those.

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.