The social networking company Reddit’s share price rose sharply after its debut on the New York Stock Exchange

At the end of the working day, the price of shares of the company with the symbol “RDDT” reached 50.44 US dollars – 48.4 percent. more than that set at PVAP, and the company’s value has risen to around $8 billion as a result. US dollars.

The successful debut was due to the fact that the company’s share price reached the upper limit of the price scale determined during the IPO, and the company’s value increased by slightly more than 500 million. US dollars.

Market watchers weren’t sure what to expect from the company’s opening trading on Thursday, given that Reddit is known for its annual losses and doubts about the platform’s ability to generate advertising revenue, which the company has identified as one of the most promising areas.

Hours before the company’s initial public offering, CEO Steve Huffman told business news outlet CNBC that Reddit is seeing “a lot of turbulence” in the advertising market.

What makes Reddit unique is that no matter what you like, no matter what you’re going through,” whether it’s trying to get into school or dating or health, “you’ll find it all on Reddit,” he said.

He added that “there are really no restrictions on the volume of advertising.”

The social networking company also said it is confident it will be able to grow by turning user data into a source of profit and attracting more users from other countries.

Thursday’s trading results suggested that, despite unanswered questions about the company’s financial losses, those arguments have at least gained traction for the time being.

Reddit’s entry into the stock market came at a time when PVAP activity in the tech sector fell sharply after the U.S. central bank began raising interest rates.

In the face of a lack of readily available financing, more and more Silicon Valley companies are selling their shares on the stock exchange, and the latest social networking company to join their ranks in 2019. became Pinterest.

San Francisco-based Reddit first filed for a PVAP in 2021, when the market was red hot due to the tech sector booming during the COVID-19 pandemic, but as the internet economy cooled, that first pancake languished.

Unlike the social networks Facebook or X (formerly Twitter), Reddit is made up of around 100,000 topic-specific chat rooms called “subreddits”, making it more specialized and less likely to spread across the internet. .

But Reddit averages 73 million users each day and 267 million users each month, according to the company’s filing with the US regulator. Most of the platform’s users are from the United States.

Content on subreddits is mostly moderated by independent moderators, and the platform requires its users to adhere to basic standards, so it’s not as controlled or centralized as Facebook or TikTok.

Following the example of companies like Airbnb and Rivian, Reddit has set aside about eight percent of PVAP shares for its content followers and most active users, known as “redditors.”

There are many questions about whether Reddit will become a successful company, as the company itself has not turned a profit in the two decades since its inception.

Standing on the shoulders of loyal but often unruly users, Reddit is not considered an attractive medium for advertising, which should become the company’s main source of revenue.

Reddit was founded in 2005. and was soon sold to Conde Nast, publisher of Vogue and the New Yorker.

in 2011 it was spun off from the main business and became an independent company, although its largest shareholder to this day is the company’s parent company, Conde Nast, which is controlled by the Newhouse family.

One of the big investors of this company is OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who organized a charity event to fund the company a decade ago.