Reddit Debuts on New York Stock Exchange, Prices IPO at $34 Per Share
Social media platform Reddit went public on the New York Stock Exchange Thursday in its long-awaited IPO.
The IPO was priced at $34 per share, at the top of the expected range, valuing the company at nearly $6.5 billion — down from a $10 billion valuation in 2021, the height of the tech boom, CNBC reported.
The San Francisco-based company sold 15.3 million shares and existing stockholders — which usually means early investors in the company — sold 6.7 million shares as part of the public offering.
The company said in a regulatory filing it set aside 1.3 million shares “to fund community-related programs that empower Redditors to bring their ideas to life.”
With 73 million average daily unique users and more than 100,000 active message boards, which the company calls “communities, Reddit is known as a more freewheeling site than rivals like Facebook.
In a twist from the typical IPO, which would target deep-pocketed institutional investors and hedge funds to buy the stock, Reddit enabled “qualifying users and moderators,” who police its message boards as volunteers, to buy shares in the IPO as well, it said in its prospectus filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
It’s the first major social media site to go public since 2019, CNBC noted.
In 2023, Reddit took in $804 million in revenue, up 20% from $666.7 million in 2022. But it still failed to turn a profit, and instead reported a loss of $90.8 million, or what would have been 62 cents per share, compared with a loss of $158.6 million in 2022.
Most of Reddit’s revenue comes from advertising on the site, but the company has also said it sees data licensing as a potential money maker.
Last month, it also signed a $60 million deal with Google to allow the company to access Reddit data to train AI models.
Last week, Reddit revealed that the Federal Trade Commission sent a letter to the company inquiring about its data-licensing practices, CNBC reported.
Shares had not yet started trading by mid-morning, which is not unusual for an IPO day.
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