Reddit Falls Short of Ad Growth Targets Ahead of Likely 2024 IPO

Well shucks, all they did was drive out their most active content makers and cut themselves off from hundreds of thousands of dollars in free moderation labor. Who could possibly have seen this coming?

Reddit's value as a social media platform drops as it's value to advertisers rises. The karma system is democratic, the userbase shapes the visual content on the site, that's was makes it useful. The more mutilated it becomes in service of extracting money from advertising, the less genuine it is, and the less people will seek to use it.

Spez would like to believe Reddit is a cow that can be milked forever.

In reality Reddit is a pig that Spez seems to believe he can get bacon from forever. Except to get that bacon, you have to kill it, and you can only do that once.

Anyone else posted this yet?

Weren’t these assholes supposed to IPO like 6 months ago? lol

Well yeah, I'm probably not the only daily active user who stopped visiting all together... after 10+ years of daily active use. They brought this on themselves.

Came from using it daily to only going there only when google forces me to use it

Many of such cases I assume

Nothing to celebrate.

Reddit revenue is still up, just not as much as they had hoped.

Nothing says you care to advertisers like single handedly blowing up your website by cutting off 25% or more of its userbase.

I've made over 1000 comments here, 600 posts, and somehow become the moderator of two communities. It wasn't all to spite reddit, but it is a welcome fringe benefit.

Fuck spez

Let's for a second take stock of what's happening here.

The ad revenue is falling short of the projected prediction of what it was supposed to be. As in the profit from ad revenue did not reach that arbitrary number.

Reddit is still grossly profitable.

This is the same kind of headline that says Facebook lost 11 bagillion dollars but in reality they didn't lose a dime they just didn't make as much as they wanted to.

We did it, Lemmy!

Remember, the reason I ditched Reddit wasn't the ads per se, it was the constant data selling, and the official app just getting worse and worse with unwanted "features" pushed on everyone. They kept getting greedier and greedier so when they disabled 3rd party apps I ditched Reddit.

Reddit who?

If I can't browse my way, I simply don't use the site.

If reddit pops up in a search result on my browser, wellll best believe I have multiple adblockers making sure their ads don't load.

I'm doing my part, fuck spez

It's such bullshit, Reddit could have been so much more. Researching my latest purchase/obsession, and the only way to find anything that isn't corporate sponsored reviews or AI content farming is to add the word "Reddit" to the end of the search.

As someone with an 11 year old account that I deleted during the TPA debacle, I fully recognise that there's a huge problem here. Reddit created a place where people wanted to put their thoughts, ideas, and opinions, and now that they are cashing out TOO FUCKING BAD LAME EBD USER.

Edit: /oblig fuck you spez. Slimy little arsehole sold everyone out and thinks he deserves to be rich because his shitty site isn't absolutely irredeemable.

Fuck Zuckerberg, Fuck Spez!! 🖕🖕

As someone has had their accounts shadow banned across of wide swaths of reddit, despite being one of its first users... good fucking riddance.

The last time I have logged in to Reddit was the day they ended the apps, July 1 I think it was. I haven't been back since. I thought I would miss it more than I do but honestly I never even think about it anymore and am much happier with my new Lemmy life.

Enough about my ex

I don't normally comment on reddit news, but... Lol.

So they did $800M when they wanted to do $1B. Okay that’s disappointing.

But the eye opener for me in this article is that they did $800M in 2023 up from $350M in 2021. That’s insane revenue growth. This is the first time I’ve seen any inkling that their IPO might have some chance.

Still, you’d have to believe they can get to multiple billions. I think it’s much more likely that they will fall flat and actually help kill whatever optimism there might be about IPOs in the market.

I don't know if reddit ads provide a good roas. We tried a few campaigns and gave up because it was so far off what we see on other platforms. The community is super anti-advertising, the targeting is really limited by community and geo.

People go to reddit to veg out, not to shop. I think the only times I've made purchases based on things I've seen are when there's a discussion and numerous people make a recommendation for the same thing, or maybe a few cases when the op is showcasing something they had a personal part in creating.

Moved to Lemmy, best choice ever.

Reddit needs to go!

Deleted Reddit because they blocked me from fetching subreddit RSS feeds which was the only reasonable interface left

Good. After killing all third party apps the site started to suck more.

I’m doing my part! thanks ublock!

The users, and only users, need to be the shareholders. A bunch of useless venture capitalist parasites should never again be allowed to own and destroy our public spaces.

Good. fuck'em.

Spez, self styled content king, screwed by own outsized ego and underwhelming intellect.

Reddit is going to be a prime short opportunity on IPO.

2024 is literally a year of leaving Reddit for Lemmy.

Fuck Spez.

Anyone here use reddit only for porn?

oh no! anyways...

I’d rather not even see that cunts face

Will nobody think of the infinite growth!?

Anyone got the full article? Falling short of growth targets doesn't mean they made a negative. Hitting 4% growth instead of 5% is still pretty good for example.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Smoke a turd, spez. 😘

that's what they get for perma-banning all their human users.

Mandatory Fuck Spez comment

Permanently Deleted

Since there's a paywall, I can't see the whole article but does this imply there was still positive ad growth and they just missed their goal or there was no or negative ad growth?

Smoke a massive bag of dicks spez

Remember when the IPO was supposed to be in 2021? Then it was 2022? 2023?

Thoughts and prayers... ;-)

Good. Fuck em. Hasten their demise. So we build a new

Nobody saw this coming… /s

Wow, they really spezzed up bad.

Lol

The company I work for spends ads on social media companies for ransomware protection and regularly spend is regularly negative. That means we spend more money on advertising than we do in income. We only do it to maintain some market share but otherwise it's just a pure loss on that platform.

Good.

Permanently Deleted

Fuck spez and his ad infested shit hole called Reddit

I wonder how ad view counts are affected when you actively drive away your hard core content posting audience? Hmm...

That place has become a reposting bot haven. The niche market is still hanging around but the main content drivers seem to be broken or gone.

Those targets seem unrealistic even without driving off a core group of heavy users.

I need to figure out the details of shorting an IPO between now and TBD 2024.

Spez looks like Ken trying to figure out how the human world works in "Barbie"

Spez can suck a sick

When the point of a fun website is finally and forever lost. Welcome to the bots and ads show!

Haha!

I wonder if this is the motivation behind removing the auth-gate on mobile. Previously, if I browsed the mobile site on my phone in a non-signed-in state (I deleted my account), I could view 5-8 top-level comments and that's it. Clicking "Show more comments" or trying to expand child comments would show a modal asking me to sign in or download the app.

That changed last week along with a complete rework of the mobile site. I'm betting that they saw a huge increase in unauthenticated mobile users with a far below-average time-on-site metric and decided to open it up.

Overall, I appreciate the change because I still lurk in many of the niche subs that I still haven't found a good replacement for. self-hosted, datahoarder, webdev, 3dprinting, et al. have analogs here, but the content isn't as deep.

I never even had a Reddit account, and was always a lurker. Thanks to Lemmy, I actually want an account.

fuck reddit

Does anyone know how far?

Cool, what does this mean, intelligently?

Is it wrong that I really really hope he makes less than $6 million out of this whole deal in the end? It just seems fitting...

Can't say I feel bad at all.

Love this for Spez.

Purely as an investor: if they can sustain that revenue growth the IPO will be a smash.

Never invest in companies you love or you won’t exit when you should.

Spez fellates his mom

Reddit is the most censored platform on the internet, who wants to use that? Before the API fallout, it was barely tolerable with the subreddit fiefdoms and the shitlords who ruled over them with a pudgy iron fist. To be honest I'm surprised it took so long to make an open source link aggregator since it sucked right after the ye olde digg debacle. "They're our enemies"

Good

In honor of Spez’ stupidity.

Big W

oh no! anyways...

Maybe you shouldn't have banned so many fucking people then?

I check 4chan more than I check reddit these days.

Maybe advertiser saw their ads beside NSFW posts? Like this?

!<

[confused pikachu]

I love seeing this man fail

yes! that place was built by normal people and they sold it to corporations. I love hearing news like this! fuck reddit!

I read somewhere that Reddit cannot advertise on its sexually explicit subs, so I use Reddit exclusively for smut. Lemmy for all my non-smut needs