Reddit Inc on Thursday told US stock regulators that it plans to go public on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the symbol “RDDT.”
Reddit did not provide details regarding the number or price of shares nor when the initial public offering (IPO) would occur.
This would be the first stock market debut of an online social network since Pinterest Inc went public in 2019.
Photo: Reuters
Founded in 2005, the platform is home to more than 100,000 online communities devoted to a sweeping range of topics and was visited by an average of 76 million people daily in December last year, a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission showed.
“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,” cofounder and CEO Steve Huffman said in the letter.
Communities on the platform are referred to as “subreddits,” and one devoted to music star Taylor Swift eclipsed 1 million members last year, the filing said.
Reddit is known for “Ask Me Anything” sessions during which influential people ranging from tech titans and athletes to celebrities and politicians field questions from users.
Like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, Reddit’s business model is based on advertising; but despite its popularity, the platform has never managed to turn a profit.
Reddit had a net loss of US$90.8 million last year on revenue of US$804 million, the filing said.
It was an improvement from the US$158.5 million it lost the previous year when it posted revenue of US$666 million.
Plans for monetization include licensing data for training large language models (LLMs) that power artificial intelligence (AI), the filing said.
“Reddit’s vast and unmatched archive of real, timely and relevant human conversation on literally any topic is an invaluable dataset for a variety of purposes, including search, AI training, and research,” Huffman wrote.
Publishing giant Conde Nast bought Reddit in late 2006 and later spun it off into an independent subsidiary.
The company is now working on ways for users to earn money on the platform.
“Today, subreddits are mostly communities for content and conversation, and they will evolve into places where Redditors can generate revenue for themselves,” Huffman said.
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
RESPONSE: The Japanese Ministry of Finance might have to intervene in the currency markets should the yen keep weakening toward the 160 level against the US dollar Japan’s chief currency official yesterday sent a warning on recent foreign exchange moves, after the yen weakened against the US dollar following Friday last week’s Bank of Japan (BOJ) decision. “We’re seeing one-directional, sudden moves especially after last week’s monetary policy meeting, so I’m deeply concerned,” Japanese Vice Finance Minister for International Affairs Atsushi Mimura told reporters. “We’d like to take appropriate responses against excessive moves.” The central bank on Friday raised its benchmark interest rate to the highest in 30 years, but Bank of Japan Governor Kazuo Ueda chose to keep his options open rather than bolster the yen,
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
RSS