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Reddit went public on 21 March 2024. I was sceptical about them. But time and time again, they have proven themselves with solid financial performance:
|Quarter|Revenue|YoY Growth|Net Income|Net Margin|Adj. EBITDA|EBITDA Margin|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|Q3 2024|$348M|**+68%**|$30M|8.6%|$94M|27.0%|
|Q4 2024|$428M|**+71%**|$71M|16.6%|$154M|36.1%|
|Q1 2025|$392M|**+61%**|$26M|6.7%|$115M|29.4%|
|Q2 2025|$500M|**+78%**|$89M|17.9%|$167M|33.4%|
|Q3 2025|$585M|**+68%**|$163M|27.8%|$236M|40.3%|
|Q4 2025|$726M|**+70%**|$252M|34.7%|$327M|45.1%|
|Q1 2026|$663M|**+69%**|$204M|30.7%|$266M|40.1%|
|Q2 2026|$805M|**+61%**|$253M|31.4%|$343M|42.6%|
\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_
A lot of people don’t realize how **low the bar actually is for Reddit to become an enormously successful company from here**.
Think about it: how many consumer internet companies can grow this quickly while reaching real profitability at almost lightning speed?
Snapchat has struggled for years to generate consistent profits. Pinterest has built a solid business, but its growth trajectory has been much slower. Reddit, meanwhile, has gone from being viewed as an under-monetized internet forum to a rapidly growing, highly profitable advertising platform.
Comparing Reddit to Snapchat or Pinterest misses the point—both went public years ago and struggled for years to achieve consistent profitability.
Why?
I think the answer is much simpler than people make it out to be:
**Reddit already has the users, the data, the engagement, and the culture. Management just needed to build the monetization machine around it.**
Huffman is a strong CEO because he is **product-first, not monetization-first**. His reluctance to sacrifice user experience is exactly why Reddit still has so much monetization upside.
And this is where the Meta comparison becomes interesting.
Before Reddit went public, Steve Huffman and the board spent years assembling executives who had already helped solve many of these exact problems at Meta and other major technology companies.
Reddit has deliberately recruited people who already helped build Meta’s machine. **CTO Amit Puntambekar** previously held engineering leadership roles at Meta, working on platform scaling and products. **CMO Jim Squires** is even more directly relevant to the advertising thesis: at Meta, he served as **VP of Business & Media for Instagram and led product marketing for both Facebook and Instagram**—meaning he was directly involved in the systems and go-to-market strategy behind Meta’s advertising empire.
**They are effectively running a playbook that has already worked before.**
That is why I think comparing Reddit today with Facebook around its 2012 IPO is more useful than comparing Reddit with mature Meta today.
Facebook didn't become the Meta we know overnight. It progressively improved targeting, measurement, ad formats, mobile monetization, recommendation systems, advertiser tooling, and infrastructure.
Reddit is still near the beginning of that journey.
Management has effectively acknowledged that only a fraction of Reddit's user base is being fully monetized today. That means Reddit does not need some miraculous new product to justify substantial growth. It can grow simply by monetizing what it already has more effectively.
And then there is the second business hiding in plain sight:
**data licensing.**
Reddit owns one of the largest continuously updated collections of human conversation, opinion, product discussion, troubleshooting, recommendations, and real-world experiences on the internet.
That data becomes increasingly valuable as search engines and AI companies compete to answer questions with authentic human information.
The appointment of heavyweight legal leadership is particularly interesting to me. I don't view this simply as hiring another corporate lawyer. Reddit is entering a period where M&A, intellectual-property enforcement, platform access, and data-licensing negotiations could become strategically important.
They need someone capable of negotiating from a position of strength.
So when I look at Reddit, I see:
* Massive global user distribution
* An extremely difficult-to-replicate dataset
* Rapid advertising monetization improvements
* Very high gross margins
* Experienced executives who have scaled similar businesses before
* A technical founder/CEO who still thinks like a product builder
* Data-licensing optionality
* And potentially enormous room for capital allocation and M&A
That last point is where I think people may be dramatically underestimating what Reddit could eventually become.
**Reddit does not necessarily have to remain one app.**
Over the next several years, I could imagine Reddit building or acquiring an entire family of products: D-i-s-c-o-r-d-like communication, short-form video, payments, AI products, specialized communities, creator tools, search, and perhaps eventually its own foundation models or AI infrastructure.
Could D-i-s-c-o-r-d eventually become part of Reddit? I wouldn't rule it out.
Could Reddit launch its own TikTok-style product built around interests rather than identities? Absolutely.
Could Reddit build payments around communities and commerce? Again, completely plausible.
Could Reddit become a serious AI company? It already owns one of the ingredients AI companies desperately want: **human-generated data at enormous scale.**
And here's the important part:
Reddit may eventually be able to finance much of this expansion internally.
A highly scalable software platform with strong gross margins and growing free cash flow has enormous strategic flexibility. If management executes, Wall Street will also be more than willing to provide capital for sensible acquisitions.
That is how platform companies turn into empires.
My personal target remains roughly **$550 sometime next year and around $900 by FY2028**, assuming Reddit continues executing on advertising, margins, data licensing, and product expansion.
Obviously those numbers require execution and aren't guaranteed.
But my broader thesis doesn't depend on Reddit becoming perfect.
There is only one company in the entire U.S. stock market that can sustain **\~60% revenue growth for eight consecutive quarters** while reaching profitability so quickly (i.e., except chip hype NVDA).
**The bar is much lower than people think.**
Reddit already has the scarce assets: the users, the communities, the data, the brand, and the distribution.
Now it is finally building the machine that monetizes them.
I think we may be watching the early stages of another Meta-like wealth-creation story — except this time, the monetization playbook has already been written.
**Long BULL REDDIT!!!!!!**