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The majority of Reddit’s user growth came from logged out users

5/8/24 11:17AM

At one point yesterday, Reddit shares were up over 15% (before fading in later trading) as the social media platform posted its first set of results since going public in March. The TL;DR breakdown? Daily active users rose to 82.7 million, revenues were up 48% year-over-year, and the future apparently looks neon-orange bright, with adjusted profit in sight for Q2.

After perhaps the highest-profile IPO of 2024 so far, there were a lot of eyes on the company’s inaugural earnings report yesterday... not least because execs staged an ask-me-anything of sorts, fielding a couple of — admittedly stuffy and heavily-screened — questions from Redditors on the call. One revelation that surprised some less-initiated observers, however, was actually about the platform’s active users themselves.

Despite its origins (the site’s basically a huge hub of niche online forums where users can interact with people who share the same fixations), a lot of Reddit’s daily users might not be as invested as the platform’s format presupposes... or as Reddit execs would ideally like.

Indeed, just ~48% of its daily active users are logged in when using the platform, meaning that the majority of Reddit visitors are only able to view posts, rather than make or comment on them — perhaps a troubling data point for a platform that’s defined by user-generated content more than most other social media. It also means that less info can be collected about each logged out user (arguably good for the individual, bad for targeted advertising).

It’s interesting to note that logged out users were up 48% year-on-year, while the number of Redditors who were logged in grew 27%, with most of the former category coming from Google, according to CEO Steve Huffman, leading some analysts to ponder Reddit’s dependence on the search engine.

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Rani Molla15h

Waymo to expand robotaxi service to Detroit, Las Vegas, and San Diego

Google’s Waymo robotaxi service is expanding to three new cities — Detroit, Las Vegas, and San Diego — where it has previously tested its driverless vehicles. Waymo plans to bring its Jaguar I-Pace and Zeekr RT vehicles to those three markets this week, but they won’t be immediately available to the public.

Currently Waymo is available in five US cities: Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco.

Tesla is currently testing in Las Vegas, while Amazon’s Zoox has limited service in the city.

Waymo's robotaxi expansion accelerates with 3 new cities | TechCrunch

Currently Waymo is available in five US cities: Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco.

Tesla is currently testing in Las Vegas, while Amazon’s Zoox has limited service in the city.

Jon Keegan18h

Microsoft pledges $8 billion for data centers, cloud computing in UAE

Microsoft announced another large AI-related investment in the United Arab Emirates today, pledging $7.9 billion for data centers and cloud computing.

The deal adds to the $7.3 billion it has already poured into the Gulf state, including a $1.5 billion equity stake in G24, the country’s sovereign AI company.

Microsoft President Brad Smith said in a post on X:

“This reflects a shared vision for AI innovation, economic growth, and ensuring that the benefits of AI are diffused broadly. Microsoft is committed to the future of the UAE and the strong ties between our two nations.”

Microsoft had previously been approved by the Biden administration to send the equivalent of 21,500 of Nvidia’s less powerful A100 GPUs. The Trump administration, which has made a big push for investments in the UAE since President Trump’s visit in May, recently approved shipments of several billion dollars’ worth of Nvidia chips to the nation.

The new deal involves the equivalent of 60,400 A100 GPUs, which include some of the state-of-the-art GB300 GPUs.

Microsoft Vows to Spend $8 Billion in UAE Through 2029 on Cloud, Chips

Microsoft President Brad Smith said in a post on X:

“This reflects a shared vision for AI innovation, economic growth, and ensuring that the benefits of AI are diffused broadly. Microsoft is committed to the future of the UAE and the strong ties between our two nations.”

The new deal involves the equivalent of 60,400 A100 GPUs, which include some of the state-of-the-art GB300 GPUs.

Rani Molla20h

Prediction markets think Tesla investors will approve CEO Elon Musk’s $1 trillion pay package on Thursday

Polymarket users are highly convinced that Tesla investors will approve CEO Elon Musk’s $1 trillion pay package later this week, with the market-implied likelihood on the event contract at one point stretching above 97% today, though it’s since come down to around 94%.

Of course, even if investors approve his 2025 CEO Performance Award at the November 6 shareholder meeting, that doesn’t necessarily mean Musk will get the full payout. The deal is performance-based and requires Musk and Tesla to hit a number of lofty goals over the next decade, including:

Boosting the company’s market cap to $8.5 trillion from today’s $1.46 trillion.
Delivering 1 million AI robots (it has so far delivered none).
Having 1 million robotaxis in commercial operation (there are currently about 30 in Austin without a Tesla employee in the driver’s seat).

Tesla’s board and Musk have been loudly campaigning for the pay package’s approval. Board Chair Robyn Denholm wrote in an investor letter last week that it’s integral to keeping Musk. Musk himself took over the company’s earnings call last month to argue that the 29% voting control that’s part of the pay package would be integral to guiding Tesla’s development of AI robots.

“If we build this robot army, do I have at least a strong influence over that robot army?” Musk said.

Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.

Rani Molla

Phoning it In

20h

Meta still wants to have its iPhone moment

More than a decade after Meta’s phone flop, it’s still trying to get in on hardware.

Rani Molla & Jon Keegan20h

OpenAI inks $38 billion deal with Amazon for compute

Amazon managed to pull off its monster quarter without any of those juicy OpenAI deals on its books that many of its competitors had. But now it too has one. The company’s stock, which vaulted on its earnings report last week, jumped 5% in early trading.

The ChatGPT maker has signed a $38 billion multiyear deal with Amazon Web Services to use its compute and reduce its reliance on Microsoft.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy hinted at the as yet announced deal on the company’s earnings call last week when he described the company’s massive backlog of AWS business:

“Backlog grew to $200 billion by Q3 quarter end, and doesn’t include several unannounced new deals in October, which together are more than our total deal volume for all of Q3. AWS is gaining momentum.”

The deal notes that the agreement calls for “hundreds of thousands of state-of-the-art Nvidia GPUs.” Notably, this deal does not appear to use Amazon’s Trainium chips, which it has been pushing as part of its massive Project Rainier. The initiative will run 500,000 of the custom chips.

In a press release announcing the deal, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said:

“Scaling frontier AI requires massive, reliable compute. Our partnership with AWS strengthens the broad compute ecosystem that will power this next era and bring advanced AI to everyone.”

In a post on X, Jassy said the deal takes effect right away:

“OpenAI will start using AWS’s infrastructure immediately and we expect to have all of the capacity deployed before end of next year-- with the ability to expand in 2027 and beyond.”

In the wake of this news, Wedbush analyst Dan Ives bumped up his price target on the e-commerce and cloud giant to $340 from $330, writing that this deal “is a continued move in the right direction for Amazon as they broaden AI services.”

OpenAI signs $38 billion compute deal with Amazon, partnering with cloud leader for first time