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According to CEO Steve Huffman, more than 76m users on average visited the website daily in December 2023.
Reddit has finally registered with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to become a public company with a programme that will allow some of its most active users to buy shares.
In an initial public offering (IPO) registration filing posted yesterday (22 February), Reddit has applied to list its Class A common stock on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol RDDT.
The popular online forum and social network said the IPO will help it become a “stronger” company and advance its mission of creating a “real and authentic” place to build online communities.
Reddit – often referred to as the frontpage of the internet – first solidified plans to go public after submitting IPO paperwork with the SEC in December 2021. At the time, Reddit had been valued at $10bn after a $700m Series F investment led by Fidelity.
An unstable IPO market then delayed the San Francisco-based company’s plans to go public, until now.
“We are going public to advance our mission and become a stronger company. We hope going public will provide meaningful benefits to our community as well. Our users have a deep sense of ownership over the communities they create on Reddit,” said CEO Steve Huffman, who founded the company with Alexis Ohanian nearly 20 years ago.
“This sense of ownership often extends to all of Reddit. We want this sense of ownership to be reflected in real ownership – for our users to be our owners. Becoming a public company makes this possible. With this in mind, we are excited to invite the users and moderators who have contributed to Reddit to buy shares in our IPO, alongside our investors.”
High hopes and risk
However, in the same filing, Reddit warned that active users owning stock could make the deal riskier for other investors. “Redditors’ participation in this offering could result in increased volatility in the market price of our Class A common stock,” the filing reads under the Risks section.
According to Huffman, more than 76m users on average visited the Reddit website daily in December.
“They come to Reddit to participate in a vibrant community, a constantly evolving place where anyone, anywhere, can connect with like-minded people and dive into any topic. The conversation ranges from the sublime to the ridiculous, the trivial to the existential, the comic to the serious. Whatever people are into or going through, it is on Reddit,” he went on.
“I have never been more excited about Reddit’s future than I am right now. We have many opportunities to grow both the platform and the business, the latter through advertising, monetising commerce on the platform and licensing data.
“Our work to make Reddit faster, easier to use, easier to moderate and govern, and simpler to navigate and find relevant communities is driving growth today and will continue to be our focus into the future.”
Last month, Reddit took legal action against Coimisiún na Meán over its decision to list Reddit as a video-sharing platform – a designation that could force the company to take on extra responsibilities when it comes to regulating content online.
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