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Reddit’s IPO Filing Shows Lots Of Losses After Nearly 20 Years
(www.forbes.com)
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this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
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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?
The premise of the question is flawed in my opinion. It only needs to be profitable because they put themselves in that situation by going public.
A social platform run by users should only need to break even. I have no idea why a web forum needs to be on the stock market.
Now it's another example of Enshittification of the internet.
That's why I said given where they are now, how would it even be possible. What can they do outside of raise prices of reddit stickers or ad-free reddit.
Yeah that's fair.
Merchandising is the only palatable idea I can think of.
More likely to happen:
Twitter's verified user subscription strategy
More ad posts with paid-priority (priority hidden from users)
Layoffs with AI as miracle cure
Selling user data for AI training (check)
Paid API access (check)
But it's really hard to ignore that its function isn't really designed for profit and it's wacky that we have to humor the idea.
Ironically, if they charged moderators to be moderators, theyd probably pay for it. Some of those people were nuts.
It needs to become profitable because it was unprofitable for 20 years. Would you dump millions into something that doesn't even have the chance to make you money in the first place? Reddit wouldn't even exist anymore.
And not follow the quest for unending profit no matter the consequences? That sounds like some socialism shit /s
There has never been a profitable social media company.
Facebook might have started out as a social media company, but it's only profitable now because it's part of an advertising duopoly that has almost all online ads completely locked up. Their actual business is renting eyeballs to advertisers. The social media part of it is just data collection for their advertising.
Reddit can't compete with the big 2 as an ad platform. They don't have the reach of the other two, and never will. So, it's not going to be a good money making platform, but it might be able to have a niche and cover its costs. There are ways it could do that and not be awful for users.
They could partner with Hollywood studios to promote shows and movies, provide forums to discuss them that are safe for those brands. They could work with local governments to be a place to release important information. Governments used to do that on Twitter, but Twitter has gone to shit. This isn't stuff that will send Reddit shares to the moon like their VC backers want. But, it could survive.
Instead, they're going to follow the Elon Musk playbook and it will die.
AMA used to be a pretty big draw for lots of people who didn't regularly use the site and often made international news, but they fucked that right up.
Yeah. You could see they were coordinating with the agents of celebrities. The celebs found it more interesting than the generic interviews they did with other media outlets. Upvoting and downvoting meant the best questions bubbled up to the top, although sometimes they were things the celebs didn't want to talk about. But, with a good PR person in the room they did fine with it.
There's a niche there, but it isn't going to be a humongous one that will make Reddit a trillion dollar business.
Yep. Everyone thinks they are entitled to be Zuckerberg. Only one entitled person got away with it and he even stole the damned thing.
And, he only got away with it until he was able to pivot to advertising. Sure, small social media companies (even relatively large ones like Twitter) also want to sell ads, but the more user data you have, the more you can convince people that your ads are nearly mind control. Meta can do that because they control Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. They got all the users because the users were hooked before they started selling the ads, and now network effects mean they don't want to leave.
All of that sucks in user data which they can then sell ads against. Reddit would just be one text-based ad site where people use pseudonyms. It's never going to be able to compete with Meta for ad dollars.
If reddit allowed third party apps again that would probably be enough to get me back. Maybe in another 5 years it won't but right now Lemmy only wins cause the reddit app experience is bad enough to drive me away.
Yeah, turned out I was actually more loyal to the app I was using than I was to the platform. Though I was also pretty good to the platform, I contributed and interacted daily and often spent money buying gold. I tend to take the attitude that if I'm getting a lot of use out of something I don't mind spending a little to support it. That's all in the past now and I wonder how many other paying users they burned.
Reddits app was always bad. Even with all the hurdles and shitty stuff they do on mobile browser I still chose to be on browser
Boost for reddit was rhe only rzn I used reddit. But now, I switched over to tbis.
This seems tricky. If you see any ads in a 3rd party app, they're going to support the developer instead of Reddit.
Cut my salary to only a silly amount like $200k/year.
Create paid accounts for like $5/year
Allow people to purchase annoyances/chaos like force non-members to use light mode only for a day.
Include bill-through services to grab a cut of any apps making money off the site.
Here's what I'd do:
VIP posts which you have to subscribe to a user to view. Reddit takes a cut of the subscription fee. With the sheer amount of OnlyFans models who astroturf the fuck out of the NSFW subs, it feels beyond stupid that Spez isn't cutting out the middle man and competing with the likes of OF, Fansly, Patreon and Subscribestar.
Add more incentives to subscribe to Reddit Premium, i.e. enhanced search functionality, the ability to time travel back to the frontpage from a previous date.
Improve the official Reddit app to the point where it's on-par with previous third party offerings.
Bring back RPAN as a fully-fledged livestreaming platform with fewer restrictions. Introduce ads (Premium users get ad-free viewing) and revenue sharing for partnered creators.
Change content and moderator guidelines to curb power users.
Pivot towards short-form video content as a separate section of the site to compete with the likes of TikTok.
You are now hired as the post-IPO CEO
I agree with everything except 4 and 6
4 because video live streaming is stupid expensive. Twitch only survives cause they're owed by Amazon who owns numerous data centers to support it. Same deal with yt.
6 because everyone's already doing short form video and we don't need another tiktok alternative. We already have Instagram and YouTube, and their server infrastructure likely far exceeds that of reddit.
Make mods actually pay for the privilege of modding.
The corporations and political groups that employ them would pick up the tab.
We've all seen the news about spez salary, to yeah, fuck him and check if others are also getting such salaries.
Charge $1 month per account, $2 for access to NSFW subs.