I think it's a quick cashout via IPO with next to no long term value. They rely too much on free work and free content, and attempts to monetize it have failed up until this point. The more investors want profit, the shittier it will become, and people will leave. $0.02CDN
Interesting. Some "people" are saying it should be a revenue dream since the marketing can be so targeted. For example for a Hunting subreddit, Bass Pro Shops can advertise and hit virtually a 100% target audience.
They already do that literally everywhere on the 'web. Every social media site targets interests. Companies have advertised on purpose-specific forums for 20 years now. This isn't new or interesting so I'm not sure why "people" are claiming this is a revenue dream. Frankly a lot of the social media sites might get better advertising because they can hit not just people who are passionate enough to participate in a hunting subreddit, but also more casual hunting people. The question is going to be how much advertising abuse the users will tolerate. For me, Facebook is already so crammed full of ads and the algorithms already strip away so much of what I'd like to see, that it's pointless to visit very frequently. The more Reddit fills in ads among the content, and the more they tinker with the algorithms, the more they are going to alienate users. And frankly, I don't see Reddit has having as much of a sticky network effect as Facebook - for me to completely delete Facebook, I would need to convince a couple dozen very specific people to change the way they communicate. To delete Reddit, all I need to do is find user communities with a baseline of expertise - I don't care about any individual person.
As soon as Res and uBlock stop working on Reddit, I'm done with them. As it sits right now, there are a few specialty subs that I peruse occasionally, but that's it. As it is, they kicked out Apollo, so I stopped browsing on my mobile devices. I also excluded reddit from any mobile search results so I wouldn't be sucked into their ugly shit.
I find FB and IG's marketing to be terrible. I'd say 70% of the ads on my socials are for something I have virtually no interest in. For funsies I just scrolled IG for a few minutes and some of the ads were for Duluth garden apparel for women, Safeway grocery stores (not one near me), some engineering school, Vuori clothing (I do have one shirt of theirs) a hot sauce, fishing lures (I don't fish), IBM (I can barely use a computer) etc
This is the same failure of an ad model that every site falls prey to, though. I almost guarantee Reddit will be the same. There are almost never enough high quality ads to fill all of the potential ad slots. High quality ads are targeted, and require a campaign and usually higher quality media, and they are inherently more expensive. There are millions and millions of views to fill. So you're always going to get tons of either untargeted ads (the cheapest to serve; often cheap media assets with little-to-no care about who sees them), or barely targeted ads ("show this to all users under the age of 50" or "show this to all men"). You see this in purpose-specific forums, too - ad campaigns for car companies, in a car forum, but also lots of "whatever" ads that fill the rest of the views. I'm not saying that they won't use Reddit subs to run targeted ad campaigns, just that they already do that, they've been doing it for years, across Reddit and every other social media site, and it hasn't been so wildly profitable that I think Reddit is going to be a special stock in this regard.
And all the senior execs sold off a shit ton. Shocking. In the end, they did the IPO to cash out, not to grow the company.