When Reddit raised $50 million in 2014, in the wake of a major scandal that seemed like it might fundamentally alter the course of the company, it seemed shocking. Reddit hadn’t raised funding in nearly a decade, and all of a sudden it was asking–just a month after allowing the spread of hacked celebrity nude photos–to be considered part of the Silicon Valley big league.
Three years later, Reddit is an entirely different company. No longer the scrappy bulletin-board site, it has grown into the fourth-most-popular website in the entire United States.
Now Reddit appears to be raising a new venture-capital round, which could total around $150 million, giving the company a potential valuation of $1.7 billion, as reported last week by Bloomberg. A Reddit spokesperson would not comment this week on the possible funding, saying only there was “no news.” For anyone who has been even vaguely following Reddit, the funding news is not shocking. In fact, it’s overdue. (Full disclosure: I’m writing a book on Reddit to be published by Hachette Books in 2018.)
What happened? Almost two years ago, Steve Huffman, the co-founder who wrote Reddit’s original code and infused it with its spirit (I’ve come to think of the underlying tone of Reddit as “magnanimous troll”), returned as the company’s chief executive. Since then, Reddit has been in a state of rapid change. The most obvious factor in this transformation is that Reddit has gone from about 60 to approximately 150 employees. Several management positions have been filled–including that of CTO, for which Huffman brought on Marty Weiner, who was the first engineer at Pinterest.
The new crew is doing something Reddit barely accomplished during its first decade of life: shipping products. The company released its own app (better late than never!?) and a new tech stack. It is also reforming, more slowly, perhaps, its ethos about responding to harassment, trolling, and hate speech by eliminating certain particularly vile communities and adding tools so users can ban others and tailor what they see on the site. Huffman has stated publicly that a homepage redesign is also on his mind.
Oh–and let’s not forget this part–the metrics are proving all this is working. According to Alexa, the Amazon-owned web-traffic analytics source, Reddit is the fourth-most-popular site in the United States. More popular than Amazon, Wikipedia, and Twitter. And the site is engrossing: Users spend an average of more than 16 minutes there daily–more than any other top site; nearly four times as long as a visitor spends on Wikipedia. And this may be a conservative view. According to the site’s co-founder, Alexis Ohanian, internal metrics show that 100 million individuals in the United States view Reddit each month. Imagine that: nearly…