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

5/8/24 12:17PM

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.

Rani Molla56m

Meta released a Reddit dupe. Reddit investors don’t like it.

Fresh on the heels of releasing a Snapchat dupe, which sent Snap down earlier this month, Meta seems to be meddling with Reddit, quietly releasing a Reddit-like Facebook app called Forum yesterday. After news of the “dedicated space built for deeper discussions, real answers and the communities you care about,” Reddit’s stock is down 4.5% today.

Last month, Reddit’s earnings report handily beat analysts’ expectations, but it continues to struggle with the perception that bigger tech companies — including Meta — investing heavily in AI will eat its lunch. The stock is down nearly 40% year-to-date.

Jon Keegan20h

Report: OpenAI’s Q1 revenue was $5.7 billion, beating Anthropic

The neck-and-neck race between OpenAI and Anthropic as the AI companies barrel toward their expected IPOs this year is shaking out some internal numbers for would-be investors to ponder.

The Information is reporting that OpenAI’s first-quarter revenue was ~$5.7 billion, about $1 billion ahead of Anthropic’s revenue for the same period.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Anthropic is on course to more than double its first-quarter revenue of $4.8 billion to $10.9 billion in the second quarter. It is not known what OpenAI is projecting for Q2.

Recently, The New York Times reported that Anthropic’s current fundraising round seeking to raise between $30 billion and $50 billion comes with a valuation of up to $950 billion, putting it ahead of OpenAI’s latest reported valuation of $850 billion.

OpenAI Held $1 Billion Revenue Lead Over Anthropic in First Quarter

Rani Molla23h

Alphabet’s Waymos are still getting caught in floods after recall

Waymo, the self-driving subsidiary of Alphabet, has paused operations in Atlanta after a new report of a vehicle driving into a flooded roadway and getting stuck, TechCrunch reports. The news comes just weeks after the company recalled its fleet of nearly 4,000 driverless cars to deal with a previous flood incident in San Antonio, where the service is also paused.

After that incident, Waymo instituted an “interim remedy” to make the vehicles “exclude additional operating conditions that present an elevated risk of encountering a flooded, higherspeed roadway,” but added that it was still “developing the final remedy for this recall.”

As we’ve noted, Waymo has mostly kept its rollout — now public in 11 cities — to more temperate climates, as severe weather poses more challenges to autonomous vehicles.

Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods | TechCrunch

As we’ve noted, Waymo has mostly kept its rollout — now public in 11 cities — to more temperate climates, as severe weather poses more challenges to autonomous vehicles.

Jon Keegan5/21/26

Report: Anthropic is in talks to use Microsoft’s custom AI chips

Anthropic is in talks to rent custom AI chips from Microsoft, according to a report from The Information, as the Claude coder’s scramble for compute continues.

During the first wave of the generative-AI boom, companies rushed to get their hands on Nvidia’s GPUs, as they were the only game in town if you wanted to build new models.

But as the role of inference has shifted to a top priority, with companies focusing on actually running models to make money, they’ve started shopping around, buying chips tailored for the task, and in some cases decided to make their own.

Additionally, Anthropic has become something of a victim of its own success at rolling out products that can be quickly adopted by enterprise clients. That rapid, wide-scale adoption has revealed significant compute constraints. Anthropic is now, effectively, looking for any and all compute capacity it can find, striking deals with CoreWeave, Amazon, Google and Broadcom, and even xAI.

Amazon and Google have both seen hot demand for their custom inference chips. But Microsoft is still trying to get its custom Maia chips into the mix, after encountering delays.

If Microsoft lands Anthropic as a customer for its Azure-based Maia computing services, it could open the door for other companies seeking another option for meeting the sky-high demand for AI inference, as agentic models gobble up trillions of tokens.