The online forum Reddit filed paperwork to go public in the stock market, making it the first major social media platform to do so in seven years.
Reddit filed an S-1 form on Thursday, the initial form that companies file to register securities with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The last major social media company to do so was Snapchat owner Snap in 2017.
The document, filed two years after the website’s initial filing for an IPO, details the company’s struggling finances and offers the platform’s power users a chance to buy early shares in Reddit. The financial paperwork arrived several months after the company entered a rivalry with its moderators over the platform charging developers for access to its internal data.
“We are going public to advance our mission and become a stronger company,” Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman wrote in the form. “We hope going public will provide meaningful benefits to our community as well. Our users have a deep sense of ownership over the communities they create on Reddit. This sense of ownership often extends to all of Reddit. We see this in our users’ passion for their communities, their desire for Reddit to be as amazing as possible, and in their disapproval when we let them down. We want this sense of ownership to be reflected in real ownership — for our users to be our owners. Becoming a public company makes this possible.”
The company said it made $804 million in revenue in 2023 but experienced a net loss of $90.8 million that same year. The company intends to list its stock on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker “RDDT.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The document was filed the same day that Reddit announced its $60 million partnership with Google. This agreement will allow the search engine to use the forums’ data API to access all of the content across the various forums, also known as subreddits, and use it to train Google’s AI models.
Reddit created trouble with its moderators in the summer of 2023 when it announced that it would begin charging for access to Reddit’s application programming interface. This code is used by third-party app developers to access the content of Reddit. Moderators at over 6,000 subreddits decided to boycott the company by blacking out their forums in June. The company was forced to take drastic action by stripping several moderators of their roles as well as replacing them with their own.