Reddit’s IPO Filing Shows Lots Of Losses After Nearly 20 Years

https://lemmy.world/post/12494118

Reddit’s IPO Filing Shows Lots Of Losses After Nearly 20 Years - Lemmy.World

I am curious. If you were a Chief officer or what kind of changes would you do to make it profitable? Reduce server count? Roll back old.reddit? Just cut overhead? How can they possibly make it profitable given where they are now?

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.