Slashdot Mirror
Reddit Users Are the Least Valuable of Any Social Network (cnbc.com)
Reddit's latest funding round values its users at a lower price than any other social network. "The company announced Monday it had raised $300 million in its Series D investment round at a valuation of $3 billion," reports CNBC. "CNBC previously reported the company's annual revenue topped $100 million, according to sources familiar with the matter, and at 330 million monthly active users (MAUs), this would make Reddit's average revenue per user (ARPU) about $0.30." From the report: That estimate would make Reddit's ARPU significantly lower than other social networks, even those with similar MAUs. Twitter, for example, reported 321 MAUs for its latest quarterly report, and with annual revenue of about $3.04 billion in 2018, that would make its ARPU about $9.48. Facebook reported 2.32 billion MAUs in its latest report and ARPU of $7.37. Snap does not report global MAUs, but reported $2.09 ARPU in its latest quarterly report.
Pinterest, which has yet to go public but is preparing for an IPO this year, says on its website it has 250 million monthly users. Pinterest declined to comment on their revenue, but a September article in The New York Times said the company was on track to top $700 million in revenue for 2018. That would bring its ARPU to about $2.80. While Reddit's value per user is much lower than its peers, it is betting its access to a valuable demographic will appeal to advertisers and potentially even draw their dollars from larger rivals like Facebook and Google. The company said half of its MAUs are between the ages of 18 and 24.
Pinterest, which has yet to go public but is preparing for an IPO this year, says on its website it has 250 million monthly users. Pinterest declined to comment on their revenue, but a September article in The New York Times said the company was on track to top $700 million in revenue for 2018. That would bring its ARPU to about $2.80. While Reddit's value per user is much lower than its peers, it is betting its access to a valuable demographic will appeal to advertisers and potentially even draw their dollars from larger rivals like Facebook and Google. The company said half of its MAUs are between the ages of 18 and 24.
Reddit Users
I seriously don't believe for a second reddit has 330 million active users per month. I bet they count in this every person that clicks on a search result that takes them to reddit or some reddit thread.
Does this mean that 4chan users are more valuable then?
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Ask me anything...
Wasn't Slashdot's value written down to $0? Is MySpace still around? Digg? Hard to believe Reddit users are 'the least valuable' for a social network.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
OK, so how are we going to interpret this?
Is Reddit bad at selling their users data or is it that Reddit users doesn't share as much of it as users on other platforms.
In the case of social media "being worth the least" means that you keep your important data private and won't get fooled by personally targeted ads.
I'd take it as a compliment.
Ps: can we stop selling each other's users and advertising content and get back to developing selling real stuff, fly to moon and mars and fun things like that?
You don't have to spend much time there to know why...
Fakebook indeed :)
Just imagine what kind of people litter antisocial networks, and now we get to hear there's a place where even MORE worthless people hang around!
I gotta see that!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Well.. I often see posts on /b/, presumably by redditors, touting various reddit threads, but I've never seen anyone advertising 4chan on reddit.
What a bargain.
A larger userbase than /.'s today, sift through the cruft comments and like /., you will find insightful, informative comments and helpful conversations. It'd be sad to see the day when they are both no longer around, since free and open verbal intercourse is so very important in todays online society.
Funny, cause reddit is also one of the networks with the highest quality of comments. I guess that according to ad-tech companies, people are valuable the more they are stupid & passive consumers.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
Since when? Are we now just calling any website that has user accounts and topic discussion a "social network" in hopes of investment money?
And if so, hasn't that bubble already popped?
Reddit got the investment, and now any post that gets too popular and is negative about the Chinese government gets removed from /r/all and /r/popular. It was proven quite quickly because several BIG posts about Tianamen Square were removed that day.
Basically, reddit has become an arm of the Chinese propaganda department.
...of wealth and disposable income which today's brand-cynical 18-24 year old represents.
Hey, I AM valuable!
Pffff.
If you see posts on /b/ you should probably also know the first rule of /b/.
With all the shenanigans against other communities that were organized there in the past, I think it's understandable if those others aren't keen on poking that particular bear.
A majority of those 'users' are nothing more than bots.
Reddit, the Least Valuable of Any Social Network
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
So many commies on reddit including mods, how would we know the difference?
of all the social platforms available, i find reddit to be the best one.
yet, it is of lowest value, that says a lot.
we could probably link the 'ARPU' to a site's quality and use it as a way to determine the most 'honest' social network.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
on Reddit on most normal topics is good and useful.
Why does that collections of questions and good advice have no value?
People swap advice and learn about their topic of interest.
Strange that educational and near real time support that is on topic has no value?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
https://slashdot.org/comments....
I'll say it again.
Reddit is a sewer.
Usenet used to be the sewer of the internet, then along came reddit, the bigger pipe into which usenet drains.
... spam you with ads as much as other services so.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
My guess is that if its demographic is younger, then proportionally more of its users know about ad blockers, or other tech which limits the users' exposure to the advertising. Another problem with that demographic is that they are savvy enough, instead of impulse buying, to search for the cheap Chinese equivalents of any attractive product they might have seen in an ad, even if they clicked through. Or if content is in question (video games, movies, music), they are more likely to know how to get the product without paying in illegal or semi-legal ways.
And finally, I'd guess that they have less money than, say, 25-30 year olds, who have (hopefully) settled down in their work but don't have families yet. (I could well be wrong about that, and I suppose it also is quite dependent on from what cultures/economic conditions those users come from.)
None of this is well researched. Please update me with actual facts!
Reddit users and their personal aren't being exploited for profit like other social networks. Simple as that. Reddit is a social network made to serve the users; not to serve the users as a dish to someone else. If others do not see Reddit users as a high commodity, all the better!
..it .was in year 2000, a few days before the dot com bubble exploded.
It's too easy to be anonymous on Reddit by using a throwaway user name with a throwaway email account. I think this is a good thing from a user standpoint so you can say how you really feel without fear of being doxxed. Unfortunately for Reddit, this makes it harder to sell user data if most of it is fake.
ITT: Butt hurt Reddit users posing as cynical Slashdotters.
That the www, once believed to be the greatest equalizer we'd ever seen, has become an even more obscene vehicle for human greed? /s
Millennials, you have only sped things along. You have the kind of values that aren't.
Its not a social network by any definition.
The talk is just flirting. It's purpose is just to get you all exited and hot under the belt and spread your legs wider to enable spontaneous checks of the merchandise. Or convince a new set of converts to take the leap and experiment, bonobo style. Nature wins, always.
Recently i decided to go ahead & take the leap and open a reddit account. I had a question i needed an answer to & reddit had a pretty active community built around the subject matter, so i went & created a reddit account & posted my question.
My question was robo-blocked as spam. Apparently new accounts arent allowed to post things... not sure how youre ever supposed to progress beyond being a new account when you cant post anything... but there you have it.
I learned my lesson, i closed my account. I wont be bothering you reddit folks with my spammy questions. Sorry.
There is a difference between least valluable and least vallued.
Just seee how you look at your own job. Also look at another job, e.g. your CEO or N+1.
I am sure you will notice that vallued and valuable are often two different things.
It is also comparing different things, I bet that the same thing will be said between VW owners and Bugatti owners. (Same mother company)
So what they are saying is absolutely meaningless.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I have a hard time categorizing Reddit as "social media". Don't get me wrong I like the site and probably use it more than any other social media site, but to me it's basically just a (barely) update UI for traditional forums what have existed since the birth of the net.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
We smoked the newsies by a good 45 minutes in reporting the Wells Fargo outage and did it with better details, wielding the TRUTH, instead of just saying "Internal issues". We helped a ton more folks with fewer trolls and jerks with their money and mental issues than Facebook could shake a stick at.
Devalue us again, and I'll see you characters in Shanghai at the shareholders conference.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
Sure, if you want something trolled, doxxed, or ddosed, or someone swatted.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Anti-social network?
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Most social media systems have a variety of ways to exploit users because the system is specialized for one thing, like texts, images, etc. Facebook is a collection of links and ideas with an API designed to associate these things together. Reddit to me seems to me to be more free-form structure and less organized from the users perspective, with less ability to exploit the users from the API level.
Its more like slash dot
The comment section of a community is a great example of how valuable the community is, and Reddit consistently rewards short dumb posts or jokes, but any sort of debate or intelligent thought contrary to popular opinion is usually down-voted to oblivion.
Their voting system is fundamentally broken, and geared towards flash rather than good content.
Slashdot's voting system -- in comparison -- is great, which is why Slashdot has lasted as long as it has (21 years!) even though it's usually days late to the newest news.
What's the evidence for this oft-repeated claim? That we behave differently in a culture saturation-bombed with advertising than when wearing a saffron robe in a remote retreat hidden away in the inaccessible hills of northern India? I've never had a clear picture how the A/B groups are factored, here.
I know that advertising affects me. This is because when I notice advertising, I make a conscious mental note that the brand is overpriced, due to a high cost structure, where the CMO earns more than the CTO, and has a budget to match.
For every hundreds small nudges I don't notice, there's a giant black mark somewhere else. Revenue vector per ad dollar invested, as measured by my own spending habits: pennies at most, possibly even negative.
I have basically configured my browser so that I go hours between advertisements. I have images and figures and call-outs disabled on almost every site I visit through user CSS scripts, which by now number in the hundreds. 90% of my browsing is pure text mode down the central corridor (if the side flow is too garish, I disable the masthead and footer, too, which means I can only navigate the site through Google search, and not by any internal click-bait).
I control advertising in my personal environment the way a marathon runner controls junk calories.
21st Century Psalm: My mind is my temple, I shall not be browbeat in my own home.
Of course, you can't exactly cancel any pervasive signal to zero by any reasonable degree of human effort. But you can reduce the advertisement signal on the order of 15 dB if you're a technically astute ornery mule.
there seems to have been some evidence recently that running ads that are heavily personalised/targeted isn't necessarily much more effective than the traditional approach of running your ads in places where your target market are likely to be found.
Which leaves a problem for publishers of general-interest publications. A special-interest publication attracts inherently targeted advertisements, but it may not have sufficient ad sales budget to make advertisers aware of its (smaller) audience. A general-interest publication may have more of an ad sales budget, but an ad that reaches every reader of a general-interest publication is less effective than an ad that reaches only a targeted subset. In fact, Beales and Eisenach report that in 2014, advertisers were paying three times as much to place interest-based ads compared to ads based only on context.
Or should general-interest publications switch to a paywall model, as many sites affiliated with major newspapers and magazines have been doing lately?
If you see posts on /b/ you should probably also know the first rule of /b/.
/b/ stands for "bland" these days. The old spirit is long, long gone. /pol/ still gets up to some shenanigans, but the cancer killing /b/ actually killed it years ago.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Eat that, Plebbit!
The fundamental mistake in the article is assuming reddit is a social network, it is not. It's a user-curated link aggregator with a comment section, more like Hacker News (and Slashdot) in that regard than Facebook, Instagram or the other plethora of sites out there catering to the pop culture addicts.
The owners and dev team of reddit are desperately trying to monetize it, as the redesign with spaces clearly meant for ads to fit (and attempt at adding profiles) shows. But of course they are, reddit fluctuates between the 5th and 3rd most visited site on the internet. The problem is you have a userbase that is rather hostile to being monetized in this fashion. The majority of users (even the teens and graybeards) use adblockers of some sort, and are very voiciferous about doing so, including heaping insults on site admins and the company president.
What is interesting is that enticing them with things like reddit platinum/gold/silver (that removes site ads and a few other perks) works to a point. People on mobile ignore the official app and mobile site entirely in favor of apps like Joey (made by a redditor and is free of charge/doesn't display ads, even reddit ones) and Reddit Is Fun.
This all being said, screw advertisers, and I hope we drive the valuation to 0 cents per user.
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.
I hate social networks, so like an elephant I know it when I don't see one.
Was usenet a social network?
Is a web forum a social network?
Is email a social network?
Is IM social networking?
Is a news aggregator a social network?
Is a blog with comments a social network?
Is layer 4 a social network?
If everything is social networking then nothing is, and the term is useless.
For me the defining feature of "A social networking service" is linked user profiles as the primary focus of the service.
I don't give a shit if reddit is a social network or not, but since it straddled the birth of "social networking services" as defined above, I'll let it be proto-social networking or whatever, since it has limited pseudonymous profiles as a tertiary feature of the site.
If you're a retarded kid then feel free to call literally everything a "social network app", because you missed everything good in computers and the internet anyway.
Reddit users are a bunch of broke pot smoking failures to launch still living in their mother's basement.
ITT: Reddit newfags posing as anons, posing as fart-huffing Slashdotters.
Damn. I think I'll file an IPO for my septic tank.
Reddit? Something's going on. Since Christmas the site has been invaded by kitten-pix, and cutie-pets generally. Then for a few days lately there were repeats of (mostly fake-news) posts of Tianamen 'massacres', and Disneyfied Pooh images (guess why), because some PRC outfit was alleged to be investing. The latter all now expunged, and all back to kittens.
I understand that slashdot has to make some money, so I grudgingly tolerate those big banner ads at the top.
What is this, 4chan?
Usenet, mailing lists, and web forums provide only "User X has replied to a post by Y on date Z". To me, this implies that X and Y are tied to the same topic, not to each other. For example, this comment doesn't necessarily impart any "friend" relationship between your account and my account. In fact, many such forums have a guideline to the effect "reply to the content, not the person" in order to discourage ad hominems and encourage in their place the respectful behavior that society expects strangers to have in general.