What If You Invested in Reddit's IPO

Reddit went public on March 21, 2024 at $34 per share. It was one of the most anticipated IPOs in years - a company that had been around since 2005, powered some of the internet's most passionate communities, and had never been public. The IPO priced at the top of its range.

Less than two years later, the stock has nearly tripled.

The numbers

$1,000 invested in Reddit at its 2024 IPO is worth approximately $2,836 today. That's a +184% total return, or roughly 59% annualized.

For comparison, the S&P 500 returned about 20% over the same period. Reddit outperformed the market by nearly 10x.

What drove the gains

Three things went right for Reddit post-IPO:

• AI licensing deals. Reddit signed data licensing agreements with Google and other AI companies to train models on its content. This created an entirely new revenue stream that didn't exist at IPO.
• Advertising growth. Revenue grew over 50% year-over-year in the first few quarters as a public company. Ad formats improved and more brands started treating Reddit as a serious ad platform.
• TikTok uncertainty. With TikTok facing potential bans in multiple markets, social media alternatives like Reddit benefited from the attention shift.

IPO investing: the broader picture

Most IPOs actually underperform the market in their first year. Reddit is an exception, not the rule. For every Reddit, there's a Rivian or Roblox that's still well below its IPO price years later.

The lesson isn't "buy every IPO." It's that companies with real revenue growth and a defensible position (in Reddit's case, 19 years of community-generated content that AI companies now want to license) tend to reward patient investors.

Browse all investments to see returns for every company in our database, or use the Growth Projector to see what happens if Reddit keeps growing at this rate.