I’ve seen the chatter. I’ve seen the pre-market numbers flashing red and the concerned posts on X about the `rddt stock price`. It’s the classic short-term panic that erupts whenever a revolutionary company hits a patch of turbulence. People see a 10% dip, they see headlines about insider sales, and they mistake the tremor for the earthquake.
But I’m here to tell you, if you’re only looking at the daily stock chart, you are staring at a map of the world from 1491. You’re missing the discovery of an entire new continent.
What we are witnessing with Reddit is not the story of another social media platform fighting for ad dollars. That’s the old world. This is the story of the birth of an entirely new asset class: authenticated, aggregated human experience. And Reddit, whether by luck or by genius, has become its central bank.
For years, we’ve talked about data being the new oil. It was a fine analogy for a time. But it’s become outdated. Raw data is crude oil—messy, abundant, and not very useful on its own. What AI models need now isn’t just more data; they need refined data. They need context, conversation, argument, humor, and passion. They need the digital record of humanity trying to figure itself out.
This is the kind of breakthrough that reminds me why I got into this field in the first place. When I saw Reddit’s Q2 numbers—revenue up 78%, a swing to a stunning $89 million in profit, 90% gross margins—I didn’t just see a great earnings report. I saw the first tangible, financial proof of this new economic paradigm. CEO Steve Huffman said Reddit is "built for this moment," and it’s one of the truest statements I’ve heard from a chief executive in years. In an internet flooded with synthetic content, Reddit’s vast, chaotic, and deeply human archives have become the gold standard.
This is the Big Idea. The deals with Google and OpenAI, worth a combined $130 million, are just the beginning. They are the first pipelines being built to this massive reservoir of human insight. This isn't just about training a large language model—in simpler terms, it's about giving AI a soul. It's about teaching it from the collective, unvarnished diary of millions of people talking about everything from quantum physics and stock market bets on `tsla stock` to fixing a leaky faucet and coping with grief.
Asking if Reddit can compete with other tech giants for ad revenue is like asking if the Library of Alexandria could compete with the Roman Colosseum for ticket sales. They are operating in fundamentally different domains of value. One is ephemeral entertainment; the other is the repository of a civilization's knowledge.

Why Wall Street Sees Risk, I See a Revolution
The Anatomy of a Paradigm Shift
Now, let's talk about the noise. The bears will point to the high short interest, around 17%, as a sign of weakness. They’ll point to the 302 insider sales and the fact that zero executives have made open-market buys. They’ll look at a valuation that seems steep compared to legacy companies.
I look at that and I see the textbook signs of Wall Street failing to grasp a category-defining company. Of course there’s high short interest—it’s always terrifying to bet against the status quo. Of course insiders are selling; after a 600% run-up from an IPO, they are diversifying fortunes in a way any financial advisor would demand. We should be far more interested in the institutional money, where giants like Baillie Gifford are adding millions of shares, betting on the long-term vision while others, like SCGE, are taking short-term profits. This is the classic transfer of shares from early hands to long-term believers.
The valuation? People said the same about `nvidia stock` when it was pioneering the GPU, and about `goog stock` when it was just a search bar. You don’t value a company creating a new market with the metrics of an old one. You are paying a premium for a stake in the future architecture of information itself.
This is a moment of profound responsibility, of course. Wielding this library of human experience requires a deep ethical commitment to privacy and respect for the communities that created it. But the potential is breathtaking. Imagine a future where medical AIs are trained on the collected wisdom of millions of patients and doctors, or where urban planning models learn from decades of community discussions about traffic and public spaces. The international opportunity alone, where half of Reddit’s users generate only 17% of its revenue, shows how early we are in this story—the potential for growth and the application of this data is so immense it’s almost hard to fully wrap your head around what it means for science, for culture, for how we solve problems.
What do you think will be the most valuable resource in the next fifty years? Lithium? Water? I believe it will be authentic, organized human knowledge. And right now, no one has a deeper, more accessible, or more valuable well of it than Reddit.
The New Gold Rush Is for the Human Soul
So, let me ask you this: when you see the `rddt stock price` fluctuate, are you watching a ticker symbol, or are you watching the world price a new fundamental asset in real time? The short-term traders can have their noise. We, on the other hand, have a chance to witness the beginning of the human data economy. And it is going to be a spectacular ride.
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