Reddit is going public and inviting power users to invest

In its S-1 document, Reddit said it made $804 million in revenue last year, the vast majority of which came from advertising. However, the company is unprofitable, with a net loss of $90.8 million in 2023.

In an unusual twist, Reddit is also giving an unspecified number of its top users, including moderators and those with high karma scores, the chance to buy shares in its IPO. That’s a privilege usually reserved for professional investors who want to buy stock at a theoretically lower price before everyone else gets to purchase it on the public market.

Reddit will allocate shares using a tiered system beginning with “certain users and moderators identified by us who have meaningfully contributed to Reddit community programs.” After that first tier, people with a karma score of at least 2,000 and those “who have performed at least 5,000 moderator actions” will be invited to purchase shares.

In its SEC filing, Reddit reports having 267.5 million active weekly users, more than 100,000 active communities, and 1 billion total posts. The company says it has reserved 1.3 million shares of its Class A common stock “to fund community-related programs that empower Redditors to bring their ideas to life.”

Reddit lists data licensing and model training as part of its monetization strategy. Earlier on Thursday, it announced an AI training data deal with Google that will give the search giant “more efficient ways to train models” and real-time access at a reported price of about $60 million per year. Reddit currently generates most of its revenue from advertising, as 98 percent of its revenue came from ads from 2022 to 2023.

“I have never been more excited about Reddit’s future than I am right now,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman writes in the filing. “We have many opportunities to grow both the platform and the business, the latter through advertising, monetizing commerce on the platform, and licensing data… As the world becomes increasingly data-driven, we offer solutions that are human- and experience-focused. We expect our data advantage and intellectual property to continue to be a key element in the training of future LLMs.”

Reddit first filed for an IPO in December 2021, when the company was valued at about $10 billion. However, an unstable IPO market pushed back the company’s plans.