REDDIT

Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, college roommates at the University of Virginia, pitched Y Combinator in 2005 with a food-ordering-by-phone idea. Paul Graham did not like the idea but liked them, and pushed them toward building "the front page of the internet" instead.

They launched Reddit in June 2005 in YC's first batch. The early site was barebones, just links and upvotes.

Later that year Aaron Swartz's startup Infogami merged into Reddit, and whether he counts as a co-founder is still argued about. Condé Nast bought Reddit in October 2006 for a reported $10 million to $20 million.

It became an independent subsidiary of Condé Nast's parent, Advance Publications, in 2011. Huffman came back as CEO in 2015 after interim CEO Ellen Pao resigned amid a community backlash, and he has run it since.

Reddit went public on the New York Stock Exchange in March 2024.

Reddit is a social news and discussion platform organized into topic communities called subreddits. Most revenue comes from advertising.

It also sells Reddit Premium subscriptions and licenses its archive of human-written posts to AI companies. Google signed a deal worth about $60 million a year in 2024 and OpenAI signed one too, and together licensing is roughly a tenth of revenue.

Revenue hit $2.2 billion in 2025, up 69%, with $530 million of net income.

Reddit (121 million daily active users in 2025), subreddits (topic communities run by volunteer moderators), Reddit Answers (AI search that summarizes Reddit discussions, launched December 2024), Reddit Premium, Reddit Chat, data licensing deals with Google and OpenAI for AI training

Grow advertising by improving ad targeting and attracting more big brands. Expand data licensing as AI companies hunt for real human conversation, while fighting AI firms that scrape it without paying.

Use Google's heavy surfacing of Reddit results in search to bring in new logged-out users, then convert them. Grow internationally, including machine-translating posts into other languages.

Build AI features like Reddit Answers so people search inside Reddit instead of leaving for Google.

Monetization used to be the problem. Reddit had massive traffic for years but struggled to turn it into revenue because users hated ads and anonymous users are harder to target than Facebook users.

That has largely been solved: it posted its first quarterly profit in 2024 and earned $530 million in 2025. The challenges now are dependence on Google search traffic, which can swing with every algorithm or AI Overviews change, content moderation across thousands of communities, and keeping volunteer moderators on side after the 2023 API pricing change killed popular third-party apps and triggered site-wide protests.

Its AI licensing deals also expire in 2027.

Advance Publications (Condé Nast's parent, still the largest shareholder at the IPO), Tencent, Sam Altman (who led the 2014 round), Fidelity, Andreessen Horowitz, public market investors