Welcome to yet another Rumor Sunday™. In 2011, Reddit was spun out of Conde Nast as a standalone company, but the publishing giant kept full ownership. At the time, Peter Kafka of AllthingsD reported that Conde Nast had considered the option of selling off parts of the company to investors at a $200 million valuation.
That idea was scrapped at the time because they didn’t think Reddit needed the money. But we’re hearing now from a source that, a little over a year later, Reddit is raising money. And the company’s valuation has jumped to $400 million.
Earlier this year, Reddit brought on a new CEO, Yishan Wong, to take control. A former director of engineering at Facebook, Wong reiterated at the time that Reddit has established a new board (which includes co-founder Alexis Ohanian) and was revamping its capital structure to allow the company “to manage its own finances and operations, including the ability to provide competitive equity compensation to its employees, which [it hasn't] been able to do in the past.”
At the time, Wong said the company wanted to gain further flexibility and get full control over its resources.
A raise now could be an interesting move for Reddit. And outside investors may be champing at the bit to get a piece of the company. Last year, the site saw 37 billion page views, 400 million unique visitors, and 30 million posts. In October alone, Reddit saw over 3.8 billion page views and more than 46 million unique visitors, which is double the number of page views from last year.
Press from events like President Obama’s “Ask Me Anything” as well as scandals like the violentacrez doxxing have upped awareness of Reddit, as Josh Constine wrote a few weeks ago. Sales have been mainly coming from advertising, and perhaps more recently, subscriptions.
Outside investors and an influx of money could also help Reddit continue to grow and to pay for servers and others costs. We’ll update this post if we hear more about the rumors.
Launched in 2005, Reddit is a social news website that displays news based on your personal preferences and what the community likes. Your preferences are determined based on your history of voting stories up or down. The company was started by two University of Virginia grads, Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman in the Y Combinator program. Two others, Christopher Slowe and Aaron Swartz, later joined the team. Conde Nast, owner of Wired and other magazines/websites, acquired Reddit in October of 2006....
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