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Chinese Company Tencent Buys a 5% Stake in Reddit

posted by martyb on Tuesday February 12 2019, @06:05AM   Printer-friendly
from the all-your-website-are-belong-to-us dept.

stretch611 writes:

According to Reuters and Motley Fool:

Social media network Reddit Inc said on Monday it raised $300 million in its latest funding round, led by Tencent Holdings Ltd, giving it a market valuation of $3 billion.
The series D funding round saw a $150 million investment from Tencent and the company's former investors, including Sequoia, Fidelity, Tacit and Snoop Dogg.

This is in spite of Reddit being banned in China, (AU website, so the financial numbers are converted.)

It should be noted that Tencent also holds large financial stakes in Snap, Epic Games, Discord, Glu Mobile, Activision-Blizzard, and Tesla.

Of course here is one of the soon to be many Chinese based conspiracy theories (about internet censorship.)

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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 12 2019, @06:40AM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 12 2019, @06:40AM (#799973)

    To pay its employees and run servers.

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  • (Score: 2) by bradley13 on Tuesday February 12 2019, @09:03AM (4 children)

    by bradley13 (3053) on Tuesday February 12 2019, @09:03AM (#799989) Homepage Journal

    Reddit has been around forever. If it's not profitable yet, they have a problem, because reddit isn't going to majorly change without driving off its users. OTOH, if it's not profitable by now, why would any new investor want to buy in?

    Hence, the question: why?

    --
    Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.

    • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday February 12 2019, @09:38AM (3 children)

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday February 12 2019, @09:38AM (#799998) Journal

      If it's not profitable yet, they have a problem

      Yes, they do have a problem

      Hence, the question: why?

      Public opinion influence mainly, that would be my guess, given the Condé Nast major ownership [wikipedia.org] and current Chinese interest.

      There may be some fools with money to part with... or maybe some dealists (grin)? Wikipedia states [wikipedia.org]

      In October 2014, Reddit raised $50 million in a funding round led by Sam Altman and including investors Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Ron Conway, Snoop Dogg, and Jared Leto.

      ---

      Sam Altman - president of Y Combinator
      Marc Andreessen - cofounder of Netscape
      Peter Thiel - cofounder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies (and I'll stop here)
      Ron Conway - VC involved in funding, among many others, Google, Facebook and Reddit.

      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford

      • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday February 12 2019, @06:34PM (2 children)

        by DeathMonkey (1380) on Tuesday February 12 2019, @06:34PM (#800220) Journal

        My guess is they're trying to get into video hosting.

        This is from the last round of fundraising. [cnbc.com]

        The new funding round, the company's largest ever, should expedite a number of internal product and business efforts, including a redesign of its homepage and its first foray into user-uploaded video, Huffman added in an interview with Recode.

        They finished the site redesign already.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 13 2019, @03:05AM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 13 2019, @03:05AM (#800463)

          This is it for reddit.

          The redesign is already harder to use. User uploaded video sites are always cesspools. I used to have a youtube plugin to replace the comments with any reddit discussions about the video.
          I have to admit reddit is likely to make lots of good viral videos right before it bites the big one.