2024: The Year Reddit Grew Up

This year brought back an old classic we’ve not seen in a while: a social media IPO. 

Reddit, otherwise known as the “frontpage of the internet,” entered its publicly-traded era in March. It had a pretty cushy first year as a publicly traded stock; shares trended upwards gently until the end of October, when they suddenly spiked 72%. By the end of November, the stock had risen 179% since the company went public. So can Reddit keep the magic alive into next year?

Late Bloomer

Reddit came to its IPO a little late in life. Facebook (as it was then known) took 8 years to go public, Twitter (as it was also then known) took 7 years, and Reddit — which was founded around the same time as both those companies — took 19 years to launch its IPO. For all of those 19 years, Reddit never turned an annual profit. That doesn’t make it totally unique among tech IPOs, but it did contribute to a slight sense of urgency. The big jump in Reddit’s share price towards the end of the year was thanks to the company turning its first-ever quarterly profit.

Moving into 2025, Reddit will turn to the classic social-media strategy of increasing its advertising revenue, but it’s also got a chance to make a buck off its most infinite resource — its user-generated content:

• In February, Reddit struck a deal with Google to license its content for training Google’s AI models. One source told Reuters the license was worth about $60 million per year.
• CEO Steve Huffman hinted during an October appearance at The Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live conference that the company will look for more enterprise deals to monetize its data. “It is an arms race,” Huffman said, adding: “But we’re in talks with just about everybody, so we’ll see where these things land.”

Jolly Good: Reddit saw extraordinarily fast user growth in the UK this year, outpacing 24 of the biggest website publishers, according to the Press Gazette. It’s now the 14th-biggest publisher in the UK, up from number 29 last year.