The American social networking site Reddit said on Thursday that the company has completed new financing of $410 million with a valuation of more than US$10 billion. Reddit is the virtual square of the consumer Internet in the United States. The financing comes from Fidelity Investments, and its valuation on Reddit is much higher than the $6 billion that it had six months ago.
At that time, Reddit completed a $250 million financing. Reddit said that it is expected that existing investors will also participate in a new round of financing, so the scale of this round of financing will continue to expand, and the final scale is expected to be around US$700 million.
Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman (Steve Huffman) said in an interview that this round of financing is not in the company’s plan, but Fidelity proposed to us a plan that we cannot refuse. Reddit said that the capital side currently gives the company more time to decide when and how to go public. Huffman said, We are still planning to go public, but there is no definite timetable yet. All good companies should go public when possible.
This financing provided Reddit with more funds to help the company grow its business and attract new users. At present, most of Reddit’s revenue comes from advertisements, which appear in the user message stream of many topic discussion boards on the website. However, in the digital advertising industry, Reddit must compete with giants such as Google, Facebook and Amazon, as well as other social networking sites based on advertising models, including Twitter, Snap and Pinterest.
Huffman said: We grew up in the shadow of Facebook and Google, we need to fight for every dollar we make. However, he also pointed out that Reddit’s advertising products are achieving better performance. In the second quarter of this year, Reddit’s quarterly revenue exceeded $100 million for the first time, an increase of 192% over the same period in 2020.
Currently, Reddit has more than 50 million daily visitors, and the website has more than 100,000 active topic discussion boards. In the past, Reddit took a laissez-faire attitude towards speech on the platform, but in the past few years, Huffman has also been reforming Reddit’s platform policy to address issues such as fake news.
Huffman said that Reddit will use the latest funds to optimize product features to help new users explore and understand the site more easily. Reddit is also optimizing video products to support more advertising. Currently, Reddit is still building a self-service advertising system to attract marketers from small and medium enterprises.
Reddit is also paying attention to the international market. Huffman said that most of Reddit’s content is currently centered on the United States, and he hopes to change this.
