• mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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    6 months ago

    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:

    • Revenue $242m

    And on the expense side:

    • Cost of revenue $27m
    • Research and development $437m
    • Sales and marketing $124m
    • General and administrative $243m
    • Total costs and expenses $832m

    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.

    • marcos@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      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?

      • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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        6 months ago

        thousands of people working on software engineering

        Doing fucking what?

        Have you ever seen a reddit ad?

        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.

        • marcos@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          All the time

          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.

          • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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            6 months ago

            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