Social media forum Reddit, which has been around for nearly two decades, is finally going public. An SEC filing released today shows that the company wants to raise up to $748 million in its upcoming stock launch — which would place its valuation at up to $6.5 billion.
Reddit plans to sell 22 million shares at $31 to $34 per share, according to the filing. The company has marked out about 1.76 million shares for its most invested users.
Reddit recorded more than one billion posts and 16 billion comments in total from users through the end of last year, as per the filing. The site drew more than 500 million monthly visitors in December 2023 alone.
Reddit Inc. co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman. Photo by Zach Gibson/Getty Images
Semrush data reveals that Reddit was the third most visited website in the U.S. in December 2023, beating Facebook with a difference of about 535 million views. Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok lagged behind at 10th, 13th, and 17th place, respectively.
Reddit could be the first major tech initial public offering (IPO) of 2024. The filing brings up the pros and cons of the platform and the value it offers to users and investors.
Reddit’s Value
Throughout the filing, Reddit emphasized factors that set its platform apart from its competitors, with the word “trust” appearing nearly 100 times in the filing and “authentic” appearing 39 times.
“Reddit’s community ecosystem is organically built upon shared interests, passions, and trust rather than friends, celebrities, and their followers,” read the document. “This distinction results in a unique sense of belonging, privacy, and authenticity for our users.”
Artificial intelligence was also something Reddit directly addressed, labeling the site’s content “a foundational part” of training leading AI models on the market. Reddit has also internally created AI to address onboarding, translation, and content moderation.
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“Our massive corpus of conversational data and knowledge is what makes us unique, and we believe its value will continue to grow over time as our user-generated data continues to grow,” Reddit wrote.
Reddit’s Risks
In the filing, Reddit also identified multiple events that could harm the company’s growth. Industry competitors, lower-quality ads, technical problems, inappropriate uses of the platform, and negative publicity were all factors the company listed.
Reddit warned in the filing that its community’s participation in its IPO could cause “increased volatility” in the price of its stock. Redditors have manipulated low-performing stock or “meme stock” before, with GameStop being a notable example that lost institutions billions of dollars.
Reddit has also never returned a profit, and the company cautions that it might have net losses in the future. As of December 2023, Reddit had a deficit of about $716.6 million.
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The site is still in its early stages of generating revenue, and its ability to make a profit depends on scaling its advertising business and trying out other ways of generating revenue. Reddit’s filing shows that there’s no guarantee that the company will succeed in getting non-advertising revenue.