What's the most significant day in the company's history? Is it the day the company was founded, the day it reached "x" number of clients, or perhaps when it earned its first million/billion/trillion dollars. From traders’ perspective (and we're here to represent them), it's the IPO day. And as you might have guessed, there's a new symbol on the stock market.
Reddit, the message board site famous for its consistently active user base and for originating much of internet conversation, filed for its initial public offering. The San Francisco company applied to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol RDDT, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. This move comes nearly three years after Reddit brought on its first chief financial officer and company executives, including co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman, began publicly discussing the possibility of an IPO to raise the company’s profile.
Reddit is the last of an earlier generation of social media companies to aim for the stock market, following Facebook’s well-known offering in 2012, Twitter’s in 2013, and Snap’s in 2017. In the years since, the social media industry has evolved, facing scrutiny for misinformation, hate speech, and other impacts. Reddit’s move is also eagerly anticipated after a pause in initial public offerings.
While the date of Reddit stock IPO hasn't been announced yet, reports indicate that the company will likely hold its initial public offering sometime in March 2024. The number of shares to be offered and the price range for the proposed offering have not been determined either, but estimates from 2021, when Reddit secured funding in a private financing round, valued the social media platform at $10 billion. Analysts suggest that the offering could reach $5 billion or more.
Public company wannabes must disclose their financials before listing. The IPO filing revealed that the company’s sales in 2023 reached $804 million, a 21% increase from $666.7 million in 2022. Reddit reported a net loss of $90.8 million in 2023, a narrower loss than the $158.6 million in 2022.
Reddit — which is not yet profitable — aims to expand its business through advertising, though it will likely struggle to attract brands in a digital advertising market dominated by Meta and Google, more e-commerce offerings, and by licensing its data to other companies to train their artificial intelligence models.
While Reddit anticipates its total addressable advertising market to grow to $1.4 trillion by 2027, it also acknowledged in the filing's risk factors disclosure that it has “a history of net losses and we may not be able to achieve or maintain profitability in the future.
The platform boasts 267.5 million active weekly users, over 100,000 active communities, and 1 billion total posts. The filing also revealed that some platform moderators and users would have the chance to participate in the offering through a directed share program, which is unusual as IPOs are typically bought primarily by institutional investors.
Technically, Reddit isn't entirely new to the stock market. In 2021, Reddit caused significant market turbulence when a group of day traders on the platform known as WallStreetBets began buying up shares of GameStop. It's worth noting that these traders caused a $7.8 billion hedge fund, which bet against Reddit’s favorite meme stock, to go bankrupt.
Reddit’s debut in the public market will be an event to witness. And perhaps, just perhaps, the folks at WallStreetBets could make it another memorable event for the market if they choose to.
