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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Trying to imagine the kind of strategy that will yield a large enough multiple of that valuation to satisfy the new investors, or the kind of strategy that would create an annual ROI that would keep them happy. And failing. Anybody have any idea what the long term game plan is here?

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As a user, I fear it is increased monetization in the form of more aggressive tracking and advertising.

Their pushes for email registration and the feed-based ads in the mobile app make that direction pretty well telegraphed.

But I'd draw an interesting parallel here with the fact that, like Snapchat, many Reddit users do it with some expectation of anonymity/privacy. It is difficult to command the kind of CPMs Google and Facebook can without knowing an awful lot about uniquely identified users. Reddit has a comment and engagement data goldmine at their fingertips, but they need to burn through a heck of a lot of user trust to leverage it to its full potential.

> It is difficult to command the kind of CPMs Google and Facebook can without knowing an awful lot about uniquely identified users.

Seems like spez disagrees, interestingly.

> ‘We know your dark secrets. We know everything.’

https://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2016/05/30/reddit-knows-y...

It's pretty clear, to me at least, that they'll become one of the biggest websites of any kind, and with a massive amount of data around what people like and are interested in.

Pretty simple to imagine that being worth far more than $1 billion. Their user growth recently has been astounding.

I agree with the first bit and the last bit. The bit that makes no sense to me is that their value should be predicated on them making at least that much in either profits or some kind of exit.

Since almost all attempts to really monetize Reddit in the past have failed because of massive backlash from the users I wonder what the plan is. There has to be some kind of major change to either Reddit or to the audience to warrant the valuation.

> all attempts to really monetize Reddit in the past have failed because of massive backlash from the users I wonder what the plan is.

Exactly this. Reddit has been around long enough that I don't foresee any experimentation that could yield this type of commercial turnaround.

Why are users worth money if they're barely being monetized? Considering how big (and old) reddit already is, they should already be profitable, and hence shouldn't need to raise money - unless they're planning something radical and expensive. Reddit is a cool site and wildly popular, but that doesn't mean it's going to make billions of dollars.

Also I suspect the site is increasingly populated with bots, not real users. I'd actually imagine the site is less popular this year in terms of real users than it was a year ago, although I have no way to know that and could be wrong. I'd need to see hard evidence to believe it hasn't had a rapidly growing bot population though.

Because they have the potential to be monetized. I have wild success with Reddit ads even though you can tell the ads products never receive much love (or maybe that's just Reddit generally).

Companies are valued based on discounted future cash flow. In other words, investors are betting that at some point in time Reddit will generate billions, even when adjusted for a discount for time. That's not crazy at all to me to see that happening.

What do you advertise?

The last thing you browsed on Amazon typically.

Could be Advertising. Reddit could do a lot better in helping advertisers spend money with them.

I've been comparing Facebook's Advertiser tools and options with Reddit's. Reddit is miles behind, in terms of making it easy to try different campaigns, different headlines, different messages.

And let's keep it that way.

Pandering to advertiser's inevitably leads to them having too much say (which they don't deserve), and trying to implement ever more tracking and insidious advertising methods.

I for enjoy the fact that Reddit's approach/attitude to advertising seems to be: here's your box-stay in your box, and you'll have these basic tools and you'll fucking like it".

Bringing crypto currency to the masses?

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