Reddit is one of the few relics of the mid-2000s Internet that has not only survived, but thrived in recent years. Now venture capitalists are giving a major boost to the link-sharing Web site, with funding that will give the company a valuation of about US$1.7 billion, two people familiar with the matter said.
In recent weeks, Reddit Inc was looking for investments totaling about US$150 million, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the terms are private.
A spokeswoman for Reddit said no funding had been finalized, declining to comment further.
Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian founded Reddit in 2005 as students at the University of Virgina. They joined Silicon Valley business incubator Y Combinator and sold the start-up to magazine publisher Conde Nast the next year.
It attracted a devoted audience posting links to news, images and video, which fellow users vote on to rank their importance. It has been the birthplace of countless online memes, but has also drawn criticism for hosting racist, sexist and anonymous rants.
Despite the site’s popularity, Reddit has struggled to find a sustainable business model. Conde Nast spun the site off in 2011 while retaining a stake.
Reddit spent the next few years with a rotating cast of chief executive officers, including Ellen Pao (鮑康如), who served as interim CEO amid a gender discrimination lawsuit against her former employer, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which she lost.
Pao’s efforts to reduce harassment were unpopular among some of the site’s loyalists, as was the dismissal of well-liked moderator.
In 2014, Reddit assembled a headline cast of investors from Silicon Valley and Hollywood. Joshua Kushner, Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen joined with Jared Leto and Snoop Dogg in a US$50 million round, led by Y Combinator’s Sam Altman.
The next year, the founders came back and shifted the company’s focus to a long-overdue move into mobile, tools for publishers and plans for generating more revenue.
With Huffman now as CEO, the San Francisco company is experimenting with various advertising formats and a premium subscription service.
The design of the Web site, the self-proclaimed “front page of the Internet,” has not changed much in all that time.
The cramped text and seemingly endless comment threads can make pages difficult to navigate. Many people do not seem to mind.
Research firm Alexa ranks Reddit the fourth most-visited site in the US and seventh worldwide.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day