Reddit announced a new $300 funding round valuing the company at an astounding $3 billion. The valuation is amazing considering that Reddit has been around for quite a while and is presumably past its high growth phase. Reddit was founded in 2005, a year after Facebook and a year before Twitter.
Half of that investment is coming from China video game producer Tencent, raising concerns from some about censorship possibilities. Reddit is currently banned in China.
Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, discusses the new funding round in an interview on CNBC:
We are reinventing the ads business both on the technology side and our ability to sell it and to create a friendly home for users and brands alike. We’ve made steady progress on all of these fronts over the last year. We feel pretty proud of where we are. As a result, we’re seeing a lot of attention from both brands and investors.
When we’re talking about competing for ad dollars, of course, we’re talking about Facebook and Google who take up the vast majority of ad spend. But when we think about our competitors, I half-jokingly but truthfully say, we’re competing with anywhere people spend their free time.
They (Tencent) are investing in lots of videogame companies and video games are one of many categories that are really popular on Reddit. But the fact of the matter is we are the only company at our scale that’s still a private company. We’ve had a lot of investor intention in the last year. So we find ourselves in a good position to kind of get something done right now.
