Reddit, the so-called "front page of the internet," or the place where I find dank memes to send my teenage children so it appears that I'm still relevant beyond dumping mac and cheese into the feeding trough, is seeking an additional $150 million to $300 million of funding. According to a report on Techcrunch that uses a bunch of words like "valuation" and "investors," Reddit's Series D round is being led by Tencent, a massive Chinese company that appears to have a hand in everything.
If you haven't been spending your time in one of Reddit's 150,000 Subreddits down-voting one of my satirical articles I wrote recently, then you just aren't truly living. Naturally, all that forum activity needs funding, which is why Reddit is looking to stack some green on the pile, a pile that may hit near half a billion in total funding on a valuation that is near three billion.
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Reddit, for the moment a private company, was previously owned by Condé Nast. Last year, Advance Publications, Condé Nast's parent company, retained a majority stake in Reddit. There's something in that last sentence that would either explain or confuse the fact that Reddit is seeking more funding outside its current benefactors, but my degree in finance was cut short when I started my thesis on Rule 34 — the real reason Reddit exists.
Reddit doesn't disclose revenues, but seemed to be searching for funding through patting itself on the back. Reddit does run click ads, video ads and promoted posts. It also must spend a huge chunk of change moderating you animals, so that Tencent money is most likely already going to good use. The takeaway here is that Reddit is still running on venture capital, still clawing for those sweet funding rounds to keep r/dankmemes running well into the future.
Moderation has got to be the focus going forward, and a good thing to spend all these incoming millions on. With all the racist, homophobic, misogynistic bastards clogging up social networks, sites like Facebook and Reddit have put a lot of effort into cleaning it all up. Well, maybe just Reddit. We all know Facebook is trash city, built on lies, while there is still some hope that Reddit will be the one social network where all those horrible humans are given the banhammer and sent packing to 4Chan.
This news is good news for Reddit, good news for Tencent (even though it's spending a ton of money here) and good news for users. The more money Reddit is able to gather in its Series D funding round keeps it one step away from going public and ruining everything that makes it great. While it might be the front page of the internet, that front page will be much better to start on if it's moderated well and avoids the public scrutiny that terrorizes publicly traded social media companies.
