Reddit is profitable for the first time ever, with nearly 100 million daily users (1 Viewer)

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Reddit just turned a profit for the first time. As part of its third-quarter earnings results released on Tuesday, the company reported a profit of $29.9 million, along with $348.4 million in revenue — a 68 percent increase year over year.
The company hasn’t been profitable at any point in its nearly 20-year history. Since going public, Reddit lost $575 million during its first quarter on the market, but it decreased that loss to $10 million last quarter, and is now finally in the green.
Reddit also grew to 97.2 million daily users over the past few months, marking a 47 percent increase from the same time last year. That number exceeded 100 million users on some days during the quarter, Reddit says.
Reddit’s advertising revenue grew to $315.1 million, while “other” revenue reached $33.2 million on account of “data licensing agreements signed earlier this year.” Both Google and OpenAI have cut deals with Reddit to train their AI models on its posts.
In a letter to shareholders, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman attributed the recent increase in users to the platform’s AI-powered translation feature. Reddit started letting users translate posts into French last year before expanding it to Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and German. Now Huffman says Reddit plans to expand translation to over 30 countries through 2025.

Reddit’s influence continues to grow across the broader internet,” Huffman wrote. “In 2024 so far, ‘Reddit’ was the sixth most Googled word in the U.S., underscoring that when people are looking for answers, advice, or community, they’re turning to Reddit.” The platform is also working to make its search feature “easier and more intuitive.”
Since going public earlier this year, Reddit has made a number of changes to generate more revenue, including inking advertising deals with professional sports leagues, upgrading its “ask me anything” posts, and cracking down on web crawlers attempting to scrape its content. Huffman has even weighed the idea of letting users create paid subreddits and even moved to prevent sitewide protests.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/29/24283056/reddit-earnings-user-growth-revenue-up
 
Damn. First time being profitable. That’s not really a great business then, is it?
 
So, Reddit could only stay in business because the person behind it is rich?
 
So, Reddit could only stay in business because the person behind it is rich?
Exactly. It’s not owned by the founders anymore. It’s owned by a media company.


Reddit was sold to media company Condé Nast in 2006 by its co-founders Alexis Ohanian, who left the company in 2020, and Huffman, who now owns 3.3% of the company. According to the IPO filing, the company’s largest shareholders are now Advance Publications (30.1%), which owns Condé Nast, Chinese tech company Tencent (11%) and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (8.7%).


Their ad network and licensing agreements will more than likely start generating even more revenue for them soon.
 
"Not profitable" is entirely different to "makes no money". Reddit must have made enough to pay its staff and server bills. It's just that there was nothing to pay to shareholders. It always had the potential to make money, it just never did. It took Twitter 12 years to make a profit. It's not always a guarantee for success just to launch something.

 

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