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Their hosting costs I'm sure are astronomical; my guess is that honestly that's most of it.
They're also, if my very limited experience with them is any guide, phenomenally incompetent with their advertising in a way that I'm sure kneecaps what should be a goldmine of ad revenue. You know those brain damaged ads like "Megathread: Why you should move all your money to Schwab" or otherwise trying to imitate Reddit terminology in the least convincing way possible? That's because Reddit tells their advertisers to do that. For real, it's worth looking over Reddit's ad materials sometime, because they are pants-on-head mentally disabled in a way that's honestly a little hard to believe if you haven't checked them out for yourself.
A single million of dollars will buy you a fucking lot of hosting and connectivity.
Unless you spend it on a cloud provider, of course. But reddit is older than the modern cloud providers.
What the fuck, I think you're right
I remember someone doing some kind of calculation at some point trying to assess the cost of Reddit's hosting, and it being all the money in the world, but now that they're public we don't have to guess. I looked it up, and you're right.
Reddit's financial statement says on page 7 that in 1Q 2024 it was:
And on the expense side:
This is a little bit of a guess, but my first interpretation of that is that hosting goes under "Cost of revenue" and most of "Research and development" and "General and administrative" is salaries. I.e. that they pay spez's friends something concordant with the $139m that they paid spez personally last year.
Yeah. On page 11 it says they paid out $577m in "stock-based compensation". I don't know exactly what that means but it kind of looks like all that whining Spez was doing to the Apollo devs about how Reddit can't turn a profit with them out there charging $3 for their app or whatever, just meant "MORE, MORE FOR ME, I WANT MORE, IT'S NOT ENOUGH IT'S NEVER ENOUGH."
God damn dude, I should start a social media company.
That R&D budget means reddit has thousands of people working on software engineering. That's some 1/10 of the headcount of the likes of Microsoft and Google.
Even the sales and marketing line, although it should be the largest one by a huge margin, I fail to see where reddit is spending it. Have you ever seen a reddit ad?
Doing fucking what?
All the time (possible you don't see them because of ad blockers etc). I just opened the front page and the fourth result was:
"Hey Reddit, there are r/nostupidquestions, so we want to know: What’s your decision making process before entering a trade? Walk us through your method in the comments. (tastylive.com)"
I honestly can't make sense of it and I don't want to know.
It's always good to have my personal bubble burst, thanks.
So yeah, they should be spending a lot of money on that line. Looks like they are.
Yeah, $124m for marketing doesn't strike me as instantly unreasonable, if they're managing to bring in $242m in ad revenue from ads that I literally have never once wanted to click on that are so poorly presented that my brain literally filters them out
Research and development and admin, on the other hand, I would have some questions about, if I'd spent money on the stock and was supposed to be receiving a return on my investment
Reddit migrated to cloud providers and it's a major part of how they serve videos. They don't self host or cache and peer that stuff. Their bills are astronomical, like vimoe. It was a dumb move in my opinion and I don't see how they'll ever reach profitability because of it.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/reddit-uses-aws-and-google-cloud-plans-to-spend-at-least-385m-on-cloud-by-september-2026/
$400 million in 2 years on cloud hosting.
And how much content are they hosting? Some months ago, I did a search for reply formatting tips - and got an entry from 14 years ago. Do they really have the whole of Reddit available like that, or have they put Some of it in cold storage?
Hell if I know, I'm sure most of their R&D budget is focused on figuring out just how to dig themselves out of the cloud pit before it gets deeper. I doubt the storage is the most expensive part of things. It's paying for serving everyone internationally with all the interconnect that's getting them.