Reddit also reported a 37% increase in daily active users. I think we all know who those are.
Reddit: Hey we lost $140 million dollars and gained literally millions of bots
Everyone: What? HOORAY! That’s nowhere near as bad as we thought
IDK why, but a lot of super-successful tech platforms in their early days were made up of a super capable passionate tech dude and a total sociopath weirdo who for some reason attracted money. Reddit was unusual in that the tech guy died and they were left with only the weirdo.
I still don’t understand how Reddit manages to lose so much money.
But yeah, that’s how stocks evaluation is. It often increases after bad news and decreases after good news, because people thought it was worse/better.
Their hosting costs I’m sure are astronomical; my guess is that honestly that’s most of it.
They’re also, if my very limited experience with them is any guide, phenomenally incompetent with their advertising in a way that I’m sure kneecaps what should be a goldmine of ad revenue. You know those brain damaged ads like “Megathread: Why you should move all your money to Schwab” or otherwise trying to imitate Reddit terminology in the least convincing way possible? That’s because Reddit tells their advertisers to do that. For real, it’s worth looking over Reddit’s ad materials sometime, because they are pants-on-head mentally disabled in a way that’s honestly a little hard to believe if you haven’t checked them out for yourself.
A single million of dollars will buy you a fucking lot of hosting and connectivity.
Unless you spend it on a cloud provider, of course. But reddit is older than the modern cloud providers.
Reddit migrated to cloud providers and it’s a major part of how they serve videos. They don’t self host or cache and peer that stuff. Their bills are astronomical, like vimoe. It was a dumb move in my opinion and I don’t see how they’ll ever reach profitability because of it.
$400 million in 2 years on cloud hosting.
And how much content are they hosting? Some months ago, I did a search for reply formatting tips - and got an entry from 14 years ago. Do they really have the whole of Reddit available like that, or have they put Some of it in cold storage?
Hell if I know, I’m sure most of their R&D budget is focused on figuring out just how to dig themselves out of the cloud pit before it gets deeper. I doubt the storage is the most expensive part of things. It’s paying for serving everyone internationally with all the interconnect that’s getting them.
What the fuck, I think you’re right
I remember someone doing some kind of calculation at some point trying to assess the cost of Reddit’s hosting, and it being all the money in the world, but now that they’re public we don’t have to guess. I looked it up, and you’re right.
Reddit’s financial statement says on page 7 that in 1Q 2024 it was:
- Revenue $242m
And on the expense side:
- Cost of revenue $27m
- Research and development $437m
- Sales and marketing $124m
- General and administrative $243m
- Total costs and expenses $832m
This is a little bit of a guess, but my first interpretation of that is that hosting goes under “Cost of revenue” and most of “Research and development” and “General and administrative” is salaries. I.e. that they pay spez’s friends something concordant with the $139m that they paid spez personally last year.
Yeah. On page 11 it says they paid out $577m in “stock-based compensation”. I don’t know exactly what that means but it kind of looks like all that whining Spez was doing to the Apollo devs about how Reddit can’t turn a profit with them out there charging $3 for their app or whatever, just meant “MORE, MORE FOR ME, I WANT MORE, IT’S NOT ENOUGH IT’S NEVER ENOUGH.”
God damn dude, I should start a social media company.
That R&D budget means reddit has thousands of people working on software engineering. That’s some 1/10 of the headcount of the likes of Microsoft and Google.
Even the sales and marketing line, although it should be the largest one by a huge margin, I fail to see where reddit is spending it. Have you ever seen a reddit ad?
thousands of people working on software engineering
Doing fucking what?
Have you ever seen a reddit ad?
All the time (possible you don’t see them because of ad blockers etc). I just opened the front page and the fourth result was:
“Hey Reddit, there are r/nostupidquestions, so we want to know: What’s your decision making process before entering a trade? Walk us through your method in the comments. (tastylive.com)”
I honestly can’t make sense of it and I don’t want to know.
We can sell 80 percent of the screen WITHOUT inducing seizures.
He does not see you, hear you, or even know you. To me, he is faceless to this platform.
I made this image for that reason.
He’s also a pedophile. He was moderator of the jailbait subreddit.
Just in case someone thinks this is a troll or wild accusation, it’s literally true. (Edit: Or… I don’t know specifically that he’s a pedophile, but it would seem a little surprising for anyone who isn’t a pedophile to participate in an explicitly pedophilic community let alone agree to publicly moderate it.)
He also – I hadn’t known this – would edit people’s comments on the site that were critical of him.
Two key notes for anyone wanting context
You could add anyone as a mod to a sub you moderated, he was added as a joke
Even more context they did give the guy who ran it and most the other nswf subs a special award before media controversy got them to ban the most problematic subs. So really it’s a somewhat unfair statement but he was clearly aware of the sub and did nothing until forced.
The comment editing was clearly a joke because the Trump sub was pinging him in posts insulting him for enforcing moderation policy against them - he set it to change ‘fuck @spez’ to ‘I love spez’ or similar.
Snoo better watch Spez closely; he’s likely to be fucked next.
No, don’t worry Snoo is 18 now. Far too old for Spez, former moderator of r/jailbait
😳