After years of speculation, Reddit has paperwork for an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange. The company, which plans to use RDDT as its ticker symbol, will also allow some longtime users to participate by purchasing shares.
In a note shared in the company newspaper to the SEC, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said that many longtime users already feel a “deep sense of belonging” to their communities on the platform. “We want this sense of ownership to be reflected in real ownership, for our users to be our owners,” he wrote. “With that in mind, we’re excited to invite users and moderators who have contributed to Reddit to purchase shares in our IPO, alongside our investors.”
The company did not specify how many users could participate, but said eligible users would be determined based on their karma scores while “moderator contributions will be measured by moderator membership and actions.”
The filing also offers new details about the inner workings of Reddit's business. The company welcomed 500 million visitors during the month of December and recently averaged just over 73 million “unique and daily active” visitors. In 2023, the company generated $804 million in revenue (Reddit has yet to turn a profit). The document also states that the company is “exploring” deals with AI companies to license its content, with the aim of increasing revenue in the future.
Earlier today, Reddit and Google announced that they had hit such a , which would be valued at around $60 million per year. “We believe our platform’s growing data will be a key element in training leading language models (“LLMs”) and serve as an additional monetization channel for Reddit,” the company writes.