On the first day of trading, stock surged
The Growth and Success of Reddit: From a Startup to a Wall Street Wall Street Bets: The Case of Tencent, Tencent
The premiere of Reddit on the New York Stock Exchange brought a lucrative payday for Condé Nast, the owner of Reddit, which controls about a third of the company’s shares. The publisher made over a billion dollars in their debut after paying just 10 million dollars for the site.
Over the years, the site has experienced leadership crises and controversy over the proliferation of racist, misogynistic and toxic content before cleaning up its act.
Chinese tech company, Tencent is the second largest shareholder behind Condé Nast. A Securities and Exchange Commission filing shows that Sam Altman is the CEO of Openai, the third- largest shareholder.
The site was founded in 2005 by a pair of students at the University of Virginia, and was started to give people a place to discuss politics, popular TV shows, and absurd meme. A community has started up around sharing photos of bread being stapled to trees.
The site became known for “AMAs,” or “ask me anything” question-and-answer sessions that sometimes attracted prominent figures, like President Barack Obama, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and actor Harrison Ford.
It has grown over the years with 76 million people visiting the site daily across more than 100,000 communities according to a filing to regulators.
Since it’s size, Reddit is unusual for a social network the size of the site to have a level of autotomy that makes many users forge deep ties to the site.
The road to Reddit’s initial public offering has been a long one; in the 19 years since its founding, the social media giant has led many lives. It was an independent startup, and then it wasn’t, until it was again. It despised the idea of selling ads or censoring user content, but eventually found itself deeply pursuing both. It has had a number of leaders, including current CEO Steve Huffman who is on his second tour of duty.
As such, Reddit set aside about 8% of company share for superusers of the site, with each users’ allotment determined by “karma,” a kind of reputation assessment based on a user’s contributions to the site.
In 2021, Reddit became the center of a stock market firestorm when a subreddit known as WallStreetBets helped organize small investors to send the stock of videogame retailer GameStop soaring to extraordinary highs, shooting up more than 1700 percent, an event that prompted a Wall Street trading frenzy and put the spotlight on Reddit’s role in so-called meme stocks.
The people in WallStreetBets are fond of betting against Reddit because they want to maximize profits, and they see the site as scruffy authenticity.
In recent months, Reddit has taken a number of controversial steps widely seen as preparing for a public offering, which it first unveiled plans to take the public public. It charges third-party developers for access to its back-end data. The change prompted thousands of Reddit communities to stage an organized blackout.
