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VOOZH | about |
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VOOZH | about |
In a second attempt to be one of the first inductees of the startup incubator Y Combinator, University of Virginia roommates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian built Reddit, which they labelled “the front page of the internet”.
The site functionality remains much the same as it was back in 2005. Users write posts, upload photos, videos and link to other parts of the internet. To organise the content, Redditors upload to specific subreddits. If the post receives a lot of attention, it may be featured on /r/all, the front page.
A year after launch, Reddit sold to Conde Nast Publications for $20 million. Conde Nast owners Advance Publications moved Reddit to its own subsidiary a few years later. It remains the largest shareholder, although a recent investment by Tencent may have diluted its stake.
The gap between a 65% and 90%+ privacy opt-in rate can mean $525,000 in lost revenue annually for a 100K DAU app — and most teams have no idea where they stand.
This guide breaks down the true cost of consent debt, why the average app sits at just 80% opt-in, and the exact tactics top performers use to consistently hit 90%+: prompt timing, banner design, vendor list optimization, and more.
Huffman and Ohanian, alongside other early Reddit employees Aaron Swartz and Christopher Slowe, left Reddit in the next few years. While many in the Reddit community liked the rather web 2.0 look, it began to lag behind the other social networks rapidly gaining traction, such as Facebook and Twitter.
It wouldn’t be until 2015, after a succession of CEOs brought in by Advance Publications, that the original duo of Huffman and Ohanian would take back the reigns. At this point, Reddit had built a tight-knit community, but had several fundamental issues which scared advertisers and new users.
While it took a few years, Huffman (led by ex-CEO Ellen Pao’s anti-harassment policy) began to ban a lot of the less desirable subreddits and dish out harsher punishments to those harassing, doxing and insulting other people.
Reddit still makes a slither of revenue from advertising in comparison to Facebook and Twitter, however it has started to see real progress.
Huffman has preceded over a greater push to mobile. For the first 10 years of Reddit’s existence, it allowed third-party developers to build apps for the website, but in the past five years it has dedicated far more time to its first-party offering.
Reddit also updated its website and app to fit with the design trends of the past few years. This sparked pushback by Redditors, so web users are able to reset the design to the older version.
The updates to design and harassment seem to have been critical to Reddit’s two recent funding rounds, the most recent valued the company at $6 billion. In 2020, Reddit was the epicentre of the /r/WallStreetbets short squeeze on hedge fund managers, using the Robinhood app. This drew in millions of new users to the platform.
We have collected data and statistics on Reddit. Read on below to find out more.
| Title | Title 2 |
|---|---|
| Launch date | 23 June 2005 |
| HQ | San Francisco, California |
| People | Steve Huffman (co-founder, CEO), Jen Wong (COO), Christopher Slowe (CTO), Alexis Ohanian (co-founder) |
| Business type | Private |
| Owner | Advance Publications (majority shareholder) |
| Industry | Internet, social |
Reddit increased its revenue by 61.5% in 2024, with the vast majority coming from advertising.
| Year | Revenue ($mm) |
|---|---|
| 2014 | 8 |
| 2015 | 15 |
| 2016 | 25 |
| 2017 | 50 |
| 2018 | 80 |
| 2019 | 120 |
| 2020 | 188 |
| 2021 | 456 |
| 2022 | 670 |
| 2023 | 804 |
| 2024 | 1299 |
Sources: Company data
Reddit posted a net loss of $484 million in 2024, over five times more than its 2023 figure.
| Year | Net income / loss ($mm) |
|---|---|
| 2023 | -90.8 |
| 2024 | -484.3 |
Sources: Company data
Reddit had 91 million daily active users in 2024, a 51.6% increase on the year prior.
| Year | DAUs (mm) |
|---|---|
| 2019 | 36 |
| 2020 | 52 |
| 2021 | 50 |
| 2022 | 57 |
| 2023 | 60 |
| 2024 | 91 |
Sources: Company data
Reddit was valued at $10 billion in its final funding round before IPO. Its valuation dropped post IPO to $7.8 billion by June 2024.
| Date | Valuation ($bn) |
|---|---|
| 2014 | 0.5 |
| 2017 | 1.8 |
| 2019 | 3 |
| Feb 2021 | 6 |
| August 2021 | 10 |
| 2024 | 7.8 |
Note: 2024 value is market cap June 15. Sources: CNBC, VentureBeat, WSJ
Reddit has received over $1 billion in total funding since it received its first series in 2012. The majority of its funding came in the past two years.
| Year | Funding ($mm) |
|---|---|
| 2012 | 1 |
| 2014 | 50 |
| 2017 | 250 |
| 2019 | 550 |
| 2020 | 919 |
| 2021 | 1328 |
Source: Crunchbase
Reddit has split age demographics, with the average age slightly older than most social media apps.
| Age bracket | Percentage of users |
|---|---|
| 13-17 | 11.7% |
| 18-24 | 23.4% |
| 25-34 | 26.5% |
| 35-44 | 18% |
| 45-54 | 11.2% |
| 55+ | 9.1% |
Sources: DataReportal, Hootsuite
The social app category is one of the most popular app categories, with 10% of all downloads being of social apps. Reddit is the most popular forum app in the ecosystem. You can download this map as a PDF, which includes a landscape version for presentations.
Reddit is on the lower side of active users in comparison to other social apps.
Users spend on average 10 minutes 23 seconds on Reddit
303.4 million posts were uploaded in 2020
In 2020, Reddit users posted over two billion comments and 49.2 upvotes
1.4 billion videos are uploaded to Reddit every month
According to SimilarWeb, over half of Reddit’s traffic is from the US
A quarter of Reddit users are between the ages 20-29
There are over 2.2 million subreddits, 130,000 of which are considered active communities