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• The Reddit IPO: Bull or Bear 🐂🐻

• Asteroids ☄️

• Trending Tools ⚒️ 

The Reddit IPO: Bull or Bear 🐂🐻

When you think about technology, you often think about eras:

1. Cisco and HP in the 80’s.

2. Apple and Microsoft in the 90’s.

3. Amazon and Google in the 2000’s.

But sometimes, companies represent an outsized portion of the value created on the internet, without being able to capture that value. 

Reddit is kinda like the social media world’s cool, offbeat cousin, popping up on the hood during the Social Media boom but chasing vibes over viral fame. 

Here, it’s all about what lights your fire. Reddit’s built on a give-and-take with its users, who are viewers, creators and unpaid content moderators all at once. 

The Bull’s Take

Reddit has a lot of things going well for it. 

1/ Ads are still a growing baby

Reddit notes that it is relatively early in their advertising journey in terms of the tools they have to build. While they’ve been in this biz since 2006, they only meaningfully started building out their adtech platform in 2018.

2/ Catch Find me if you can

Reddit boasts a surprisingly unique audience base. The platform can allow advertisers to reach an audience that can’t be reached via other social platforms. 

A lot of users reach Reddit through search engines or other places when seeking out recommendations making them a higher-intent audience compared to someone just scrolling through Instagram cat meme reels. 

3/ Struck Gold - Data

Reddit is much more than memes and AMAs: It’s a data-platform and a search engine. It has a large-scale UGC data corpus, and perhaps one of the most interesting ones when it comes to anonymity and authenticity. 

It has a corpus of over 1B posts and over 16B comments, generally well categorized across thousands of different niches and communities.

In the age of LLMs, such data is nothing short of gold.

The Bear’s Take

1/ Ads are still a growing baby

This wouldn’t have been a concern if Reddit was a young startup. However, the company is almost 2 decades old and you’d think that by now, it would’ve built a mature adtech platform like its peers such as Meta, Pinterest and Snap.

2/ Catch Find me if you can

Remember the whole GameStop saga? That was all thanks to Reddit’s r/wallstreetbets. While it was a wild ride, it’s the kind of thing that keeps Reddit’s execs up at night. 

The company is afraid it could make its stock price and volume extremely volatile.

3/ Struck Gold - Data

There’s a definite potential of Reddit making data licensing into a substantial revenue stream. At the same time however, AI could pose a threat.

If all these models are trained on Reddit data, people could seek to use these models and ask them questions directly instead of coming to Reddit.

We’ve seen this happening before with companies like Chegg and Stackoverflow.

What’s your take on the Reddit IPO? Are you bullish or bearish?

☄️ Asteroids ☄️

TikTok's fate in the U.S. hangs by a thread as Congress pushes a bill forcing its sale away from ByteDance to avoid a ban, despite massive user backlash and presidential support for the move. 🇺🇸💼

Techstars faces uncertainty with its $80M Advancing Cities Fund as J.P. Morgan disengages, citing missteps and diverse founder representation issues, putting future collaborations and jobs in jeopardy. 🌐💸

Activision Publishing's QA department, assisted by CWA, forms the largest video game union in the US, boosting labor rights in the wake of Microsoft’s supportive acquisition. 🎮🤝

⚒️ Trending Tools ⚒️

▶️ Thumblytics - Test YouTube thumbnails and titles before you publish

🗺️ Trimap - Your trips on world map

🌐 Aptible - No Infrastructure Platform to deploy in seconds

⚡️ Guidde - Magically create stunning how-to guides with AI.

📰 Recommended Reading 📰

AI Jane: Artificial intelligence investment journalist building an easy to read ai investing email newsletter. Get smarter about investing in ai in 5 minutes.

The Aurorean: This newsletter scours 100+ sources so you don’t have to. The Aurorean is your guide to discover the essential news, research, beauty and humor in science every week.

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