this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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How tf is reddit not profitable? When I first joined reddit it had a progress bar to the side that showed the percentage of server costs covered by reddit gold and it was always filled. Since then they started showing lots more ads, added reddit coins, awards and premium subscription to increase their revenue. The increase in their cost/user has to be from the native image/video uploads and redisigning the website/app. If YouTube manages to be profitable hosting 4k videos, reddit must be doing something very stupid to become unprofitable with their low quality videos.
Server costs are probably a small proportion of their costs, labour costs are probably going to be the biggest part, and I wouldn't be surprised if Spez's salary/bonus knocks them from profitable to unprofitable, as being profitable is bad for tax purposes
With all due respect and empathy to reddit's employees who do deserve gainful employment:
Does a link aggregator really need a huge labor pool? In terms of functionality Lemmy is already on par with how I remember Reddit 10 years ago (compared to which the experience of Reddit today is actually worse). And Lemmy achieves it with what, an extreme fraction of the labor cost?
Props to all the devs, admins, etc who are hosting all these Lemmy instances for us, btw :)
Yea I read somewhere that Reddit has upwards of 2,000 employees. Like, what.
Majority of them hired last year, back in 2021 they only had 700. The only reasonable explanation would have been adding hundreds of new admins/moderators, but I don't think that was the case, so I have no clue what all of them have been doing for the last year and a half.
Half are probably involved in the ads side of things.
My guess? 250 devs 200 administrative folks (secretaries, hr, accounting, etc) 50 executive level 1500 marketing and communications and sales folks
:)
Don't forget legal. Defensive and offensive.