HACKER Q&A
📣 graeme

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

  👤 seewhydee Accepted Answer ✓
Reminder that Google killed Google Reader, which was a wonderful front-end to the web, to try to funnel users toward Google+.

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.

👤 buu700
I had the exact same thought when I saw that headline. It would also be a way for Google to finally break into social media, and maybe it would be useful as a source of AI training data.
👤 akagusu
A social network like reddit fully integrated with Google services and fueling google's algorithms could take Google to the next level
👤 CM30
Given Google's terrible track record of shutting down products and services that don't meet their expectations:

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.

👤 paride5745
I am thinking this as well.

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.

👤 bitsoda
The same thought crossed my mind when I noticed how useless Google had become after Rexxit, so I don’t think it’s insane.

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.

👤 amai
The Google monopole must be split up. Giving Google even more products is going in the completely wrong direction.
👤 Sunspark
Why buy Reddit if you can make a copy of Reddit?

Facebook plans to make a copy of Twitter.

👤 rytheturtle
I don’t think Google has any incentive to buy Reddit. Financially, Reddit is nearing IPO, which means it’s being sold at a short term peak valuation during a time where they need to raise capital.

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.