• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      $6.5B valuation (assuming a standard 20x EPS model) should imply in the neighborhood of $325M/year in revenue from a company that makes about a third of that.

      Either Reddit plans on tripling its revenues in the near future or this is an unrealistic target.

  • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    When I look at those numbers I think “Apollo was made by 1 dude with some occasional help from another person. Reddit is throwing half its budget and 200+ bodies at its app and site, and it’s a fucking disaster.”

    • phcorcoran@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      The comparison is even more apt when you remember that the official Reddit app also used to be the most popular and great 3rd-party app called AlienBlue, which was purchased from 1 guy and rebranded a decade ago.

      It’s pretty clear that the reason why the official Reddit app isn’t good is because a good experience for their users isn’t their goal.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        a good experience for their users isn’t their goal

        They are in tension with the more pressing goal of extracting revenue. But how do you extract revenue from a site that’s mostly just “user content” + “ads” in an era when ad revenue is plummeting?

        Maybe if they increase the prices on Reddit Gold?

    • bus_factor@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Different goals. The goal of Apollo was to make a good app. The goal of the official reddit app is to show you ads and siphon money off you.

      I guarantee you a good chunk of that R&D money is for making ads more profitable and other monetization.

      • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        To be fair, the point of Apollo was to also make money. But it was to make money by selling you things that made a nice experience nicer. Reddit makes money by selling you stuff that makes a shitty experience slightly less shitty.

        • NateNate60@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          I said it before on Reddit and I will say it again here—

          If Reddit has asked me for a premium subscription to use my favourite third-party app, I would have fucking paid.

          Just bad business all around

          • Kinglink@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            I don’t know the right price point, but 1 dollar a month probably would have worked for most people. It just wasn’t enough because they probably can make more than 1 by spoon feeding you ads now.

            • kingthrillgore@lemmy.mlOP
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              8 months ago

              I’d go as far as 5 dollars a month, which is more than the buck thirty they make off users right now.

              • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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                8 months ago

                It just boggles the mind.

                They had the userbase. They had the community moderation. They had the power-users basically doing their job for them. They could have had a bulletproof, tied-to-world-population-growth metric - not super fast, but basically monotonically increasing. They basically could have turned it into a sustainable money printer, while not crushing user enthusiasm. Hell, they could have even done an opt- in policy for ML training datasets, either offsetting or outright paying users a commission for content that’s used as part of a training set. There were so many possibilities that didn’t involve pointing the ship at an iceberg.

                Spez threw it away because he wanted the quick payout from ad revenue.

                • Hackerman_uwu@lemmy.world
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                  8 months ago

                  Spez threw it away because he’s a libertarian tool. He doesn’t care how he gets the payout as long as it’s not ‘collectivist’. This commie shit your’e spouting in this post would not impress daddy Elon. GTFO.