Reddit has gone public, making its debut on the New York stock exchange.
Reddit is one of the world’s most popular websites with 73 million unique active visitors a day across over 100 thousand forums.
Going public could majorly change the platform though, from advertising to how Reddit forums are moderated.
In this episode of The Briefing, Sacha Barbour Gatt sits down with James Hennessy to find out what this means for the future of the website:
Reddit’s Wall Street debut put the value of the company close to US$9 billion seconds after it began trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
“Shareholders really want one thing,” Hennessy says. “They want to make money, they want to see the company grow, they want to see the stock price go up.”
Hennessy says “one of the key opportunities that they’ve seen is in the world of AI” due to the amount of rich, clean content on the platform.
Reddit has a large audience that visit forums to discuss a range of subjects, from silly memes to existential worries, to recommendations from like-minded people.
The risk of shareholders dictating advertising and how content is moderated may deter people from continuing to use the platform.
“One of the key risks they keep coming back to is ‘we have a very passionate but very unpredictable user base, and one day they might just freak out and stop using Reddit because of something we’ve done’,” Hennessy says.
Subscribe to The Briefing, Australia’s fastest-growing news podcast on LiSTNR today. The Briefing serves up the latest news and deep dives on topics affecting you, all in under 20 minutes.