Ask HN: Should Google Buy Reddit?
Prompted by people on twitter saying Google has become useless since the shutdown as you can’t search stuff like “Aeron chair review reddit”
Reddit wants to go public at around $15 billion. Fidelity has marked it down to around $11 billion. Assume fair value somewhere in that range.
More expensive than your average google acquisition but they get:
1. A guarantee that Reddit won’t run Reddit into the ground and/or do away with the text based communities that power google
2. The ability to run google’s ad network on reddit, including reddit video. Google could surely get more profit from the content than reddit does
Is this insane? There’s probably also some leverage for Bard as we enter the AI era
Reddit was even run in a hands off way during the Conde Nast era. Google could emulate that
13 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 41.2 ms ] threadFacebook plans to make a copy of Twitter.
From an operational standpoint, Reddit sparked the outrage over measures they’re taking to (theoretically) start turning g a profit. Google profits will be very unlikely to have noticeable decline from a temporary protest over Reddit increasing API fees. So I don’t think there’s much business sense in Google investing in Reddit compared to other avenues that would more directly affect their bottom line.
As everyone knows, Google+ never gained the traction Google wanted, but it did have a decent commenting/discussion interface which a few specialised communities (e.g. academic maths) latched on to.
And Google killed that too.
Reddit has a huge value for Google, and Google doesn't need to monetize APIs and even care too much about 3rd party clients without ads. The real value of Reddit is its data/content, and Google might value that more than ads for training its AI.
It’s a small fortune for Google, but Reddit is the de facto forum software with Discord a close second, so I think it’d be worth it.
https://killedbygoogle.com/
I'd be very, very worried for Reddit's future if they bought it. It's already a service that isn't making the type of money the VCs hoped it would, and which is resorting to desperate measures before its IPO. Google would probably swing the axe down on it in the first 5 years if they acquired.
Outside of that, Google is no stranger to making their services worse too, as everything from Google Search to Gmail and YouTube has shown in the last few years or so. So they're not that much less likely to run it into the ground if they do keep it open either.