If the market for initial public offerings recovers in the new year, one company that aims to go public early on is Reddit. An IPO will put the spotlight on the prospects for Reddit’s advertising business, which has fallen short of ambitious growth targetsoutlined by executives two years ago. ...
    • FlumPHP@programming.devEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      Reddit expects to finish this year with ad revenue … slightly over $800 million… Reddit had said two years ago it aimed to exceed $1 billion in ad revenue by 2023…

      So they missed their two year goal by 20%. They had forecasted a 2.9x growth and achieved 2.3x

      When it comes time to IPO, they’ll just blame the economy and ad blockers, while showing how many users they forced into their app where ad blocking is harder.

      • PorkSoda@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        9 months ago

        while showing how many users they forced into their app where ad blocking is harder.

        Laughs in DNS-level blocking

      • pelespirit@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        0·
        9 months ago

        Thanks for the info. Can advertisers tell if it’s bots or not? I would think the new users are just them making stuff up.

      • Alto@kbin.social
        0·
        9 months ago

        Yep, in the face of the infinite growth monster, anything other than exceeding expectations is seen as a failure

        • FaceDeer@kbin.social
          0·
          9 months ago

          I still remember a line from a boss I had in one of my very first “real” jobs. “I expect you to exceed my expectations.”

          I didn’t bother pointing out the problem there. I also didn’t stay working for her for very long. :)

        • Facebones@reddthat.comEnglish
          0·
          9 months ago

          “We see here you’re up 5%, but you were up 5% last year too, so you’re dead now.”

          -Capitalism

          • SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.mlEnglish
            0·
            9 months ago

            There’s really not a lot more to it. I did it a really long time ago so I don’t remember everything, and some things may have changed, but it went kind of like this.

            First, you have to open an account at a broker. Let’s say you choose E*Trade. They’re pretty much all the same these days. Then you fund your account. You can transfer in $1000 or $5000. Once the account is open and the money is in it, you can buy and sell stocks using their app or web ui.

            With the basic account like this, you’re using your own money to buy and sell. If there’s a company ABC that’s trading for $10/share, you can buy 100 shares for $1000. Let’s say it goes up to $15 in a year. You can then sell it for a 50% profit (minus some small brokerage fees).

            A margin account is meant for people who have more experience in trading, but you indicate that by self-certifying. With a margin account, you can still trade in cash transactions, but you can also borrow money to trade with. If all of your cash is tied up in investments (for instance) you can use those investments as collateral to borrow funds to make additional trades. You’re paying interest on what you borrow, which will subtract from your profits. If your investments drop in value, you may be forced into a position where you get a margin call and are forced to sell off some stock or deposit more money.

            Anyway, at that point you can start to do things like shorting a stock. Shorting is where you think a share price is going to go down. Let’s say I’m not invested in ABC, but I think they’re going to go down. I can sell 100 shares of ABC at $10 per share by borrowing them from someone else’s account (the broker handles all of this). That gives me an immediate $1000 cash in my account, against a debt of $1000. If ABC goes down to $5, then I can close out the position by buying the 100 shares at $5, leaving me again a $500 profit. If on the other hand ABC goes up to $15, then I’ll close out the position and lose $500.

            With all of that said, you shouldn’t worry about investing like that if you’re not funding your 401k or retirement account first, and you should have an emergency fund put aside before that. If you have those covered, the best first step is to open the brokerage account and get into an index fund, like the Vanguard fund that tracks the S&P. After that, you can get to learning about what your next steps should be.

    • ricecake@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      You open a brokerage account and get margin approval.

      When it IPOs, you do a short sale at your brokerage.
      You get the cash for the sale immediately, and get charged interest for your brokerage “lending” you the shares you sold.
      Later, you buy the shares back or “buy to cover” and that makes you square with your brokerage.

      Hopefully the price went down enough so that the difference between what you sold at and bought at was greater than the interest you paid.

      • metaStatic@kbin.social
        0·
        9 months ago

        not pictured: Real investors gamblers spiking the price to shake out small investors. Leverage has destroyed many people mere seconds before the market turns around.

  • Silverseren@kbin.social
    0·
    9 months ago

    I wonder how ad view counts are affected when you actively drive away your hard core content posting audience? Hmm…

    • HactaiiMiju@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      Third party apps didn’t show ads, so I guess ad views didn’t change that much after the blackout. They might even have gone up a bit with some users who started using the “official” ad-laced app.

  • Bonehead@kbin.social
    0·
    9 months ago

    Is it wrong that I really really hope he makes less than $6 million out of this whole deal in the end? It just seems fitting…

  • Binthinkin@kbin.social
    0·
    9 months ago

    That place has become a reposting bot haven. The niche market is still hanging around but the main content drivers seem to be broken or gone.

  • kingthrillgore@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    Nothing says you care to advertisers like single handedly blowing up your website by cutting off 25% or more of its userbase.

    • Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.caEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      They feel like they get shorted because many of those users don’t contribute to ad revenue from 3rd party apps but instead of improving their app to lure users in they instead tell those users to fuck off.

      A user is a user, even if they don’t contribute directly to ad revenue they contribute content to make the site more alluring for those who will contribute to ad revenue. As well they help spread the word about reddit to those who don’t use it regularly yet by sharing that content outside of reddit.

      They were pretty short sighted by doing what they did.

      • Butt Pirate@reddthat.comEnglish
        0·
        9 months ago

        They should have just made third party API access a premium feature you buy with gold. Not nearly as many people would have left. And if Reddit didn’t want competition in the UI space, they should have made their own interface at least somewhat usable. A mobile responsive website is not exactly difficult to accomplish these days, but for some reason Reddit just can’t do it.

      • andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        0·
        9 months ago

        It’s just many power users and mods were power users and mods thanks to tools in these apps, and Reddit still didn’t provide anything comparable. Many small communities I still care about have a lot less posts if they don’t have bots. It’s not like Fediverse won Reddit, but something changed in them. NSFW OC subs are still good, but idk if they make the image spez wants from that platfom. The only thing we def should do is to stay online and be welcome for stray redditors to join.

      • Kecessa@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        0·
        9 months ago

        Some app dev mentioned they wanted to work with them to introduce ads that Reddit would have made profit from in the free version of the app and it’s Reddit that said “Nah it’s ok”…

  • vexikron@lemmy.zipEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    As someone has had their accounts shadow banned across of wide swaths of reddit, despite being one of its first users… good fucking riddance.

      • vexikron@lemmy.zipEnglish
        0·
        9 months ago

        Fuck man, I’ve had this happen to me multiple times:

        1. I make a relatively long and detailed comment.

        2. Someone replies with a vehement argument against a /misreading/ of many of the things I said in my comment.

        3. I point out that the replier is misunderstanding or misreading my original comment

        4. My original comment /is then edited not by myself/ to make it seem like the replier was correct the whole time, and then the same or other repliers dogpile on the thread claiming I am insane.

        It is truly unfortunate that so many reddit mods seemingly have no problem using alt accounts and abusing their powers exist governing very interesting niche subject matter communities that you will just never realistically find a group of like minded people in the real, not online.

        People used to think the internet could be used to the mass benefit of humanity by sharing information and having lively discussions about it.

        It is now clear that the vast majority of people basically just use it to consume mediocre entertainment content and basically have one kind or another of popularity contest.