Reddit Just Had Its First Profitable Quarter, 19 Years After Launch

📝 The Verge reports…

Reddit just turned a profit for the first time. As part of its third quarter earnings results released on Tuesday, the company reported a profit of $29.9 million, along with $348.4 million in revenue — a 68 percent increase year over year.

The company hasn’t been profitable at any point in its nearly 20-year history. Since going public, Reddit lost $575 million during its first quarter on the market, but it decreased that loss to $10 million last quarter and is now finally in the black.

Another report explains Reddit’s new-found profitability…

Reddit’s user growth is surging, helping build momentum for advertising sales. It also has a new revenue stream in AI content licensing.

I have a love-hate relationship with Reddit 😕

On the one hand it’s a great one-stop shop for finding real conversation about any topic.

On the other hand, Reddit has pretty much killed the thousands of independent forums and message boards that once populated the internet 😭

There seemed to be one for every possible niche, operated and moderated by people passionate about their chosen topic.

I’m sure many of those people made a decent living from such forums as well.

But now Reddit has replaced them all 😔

Worse still: it’s apparently against Reddit’s terms of service to monetize a subreddit, so those old-school forum operators can’t simply shift operations to Reddit and continue to earn a living.

Although that may soon change…

• Reddit might let users make paid subreddits