I invested $2.2 million in $RDDT on Friday because of one key error the market made on earnings.
My investment thesis in general stems on waiting for the market to get something wrong and take advantage. Two days ago it got it wrong on Reddit.
The main thing is this - market assumes Google using Reddit to display instant answers in search without click through represent a systematic danger to the site. At a time where Reddit contemplates revisiting its Google training data deal.
Then market looked at earnings, found a less than 1% move in DAUs in US which was the only metric not up double digits, and immediately pointed that’s what it feared. That’s the mistake.
Sidenote - back when I built niche marketplaces in high ticket spaces, one breakthrough moment was when updated our sites to target search engines to display our data in instant answers (what market is afraid of here)
Why? Because, sure, not everyone who saw the data clicked through, but the overall number of users went up as a result of first result status being almost guaranteed and because those that did were much more targeted customers as those looking only at spec data got that on the Google page.
For DuckDuckGo we even built the instant answers plugin ourselves to get that result.
So Google displaying these instant answers is not only not a threat, it’s a great thing for Reddit and its advertisers as it’s where they can find users with the highest intent possible, allowing Reddit to keep ramping up its revenue.
Reddit revamping its LLM deal for training data with Google will also only increase the revenue run rate for Reddit which is slowly turning into a fast growing free cash flow machine with 375 million in EBITDA. Per quarter on 800 million of revenue, all going up 20% YOY.
Reddit is really cheap by any valuation metric, especially for a high growth business, but to me the most important part is to understand why the opportunity appeared and what the market got wrong. This is