After three years of waiting, Reddit is finally expected to launch its IPO in March

The social platform Reddit has developed detailed plans to launch its initial public offering (IPO) in March, progressing with a stock market listing that has been awaited for over three years. This will be the first IPO of a major social network to debut since Pinterest did so in 2019.

The IPO comes at a time when Reddit and its competitors are facing fierce competition in advertising from platforms like TikTok and Facebook. The company filed for its IPO in December 2021, with the completion of the listing process anticipated by the end of March.

Reddit is valued at around $15 billion and plans to sell about 10 percent of its shares in the IPO, according to Reuters, while Bloomberg reported earlier this year that the company is negotiating with potential investors such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. However, many reports suggest that Reddit’s plans could be delayed, which is not uncommon, and therefore they have declined to comment on the IPO news.

Reddit was founded back in 2005 by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, and it gained immense popularity thanks to its niche discussion groups. The company primarily generates revenue through advertising, and in the past, it attributed its losses to investments in the platform and users who are uninterested in advertising on it.

Center of numerous controversies

The leaders of the popular social network have refrained from launching the IPO until they approached profitability, and the continuous postponement of the listing has also been contributed to by bouts of volatility that have closed the IPO market over the past two years.

It is estimated that Reddit generated just over $800 million in advertising revenue last year, which is 20 percent more than the previous year. Of course, the past year was exceptionally good for social networks, as Meta’s shares more than tripled in value over the past 12 months, while Snap’s shares rose 60 percent in the same period.

Over the years of its existence, the platform has been at the center of numerous controversies, such as the one with GameStop, and interestingly, last summer a strike against its usage policy began on the platform.

Recall that in June 2023, millions of users were unable to access their groups as moderators protested against the platform due to its policy on high prices for accessing Reddit’s API.

Several thousand subreddit groups were inactive, and it all started with the announcement that Reddit wanted to charge third-party app developers, which were created to help users navigate the site, for collecting data from the platform.

In any case, Reddit is one of the favorite social networks for millions of users on the internet, and its mobile app today boasts over 100 million downloads in app stores, so the IPO could certainly generate significant interest.