In an unusual move, Reddit, the community-focused message board, filed to go public. It could be the first major social media to debut on the stock market in years.

In a registration statement, the San Francisco-based company detailed its financials results. It reported revenues for 2022 and 2023 of US$666.7 million and US$804 million, respectively, which represents year-over-year growth of 21%. In 2023, it lost US$90 million, compared to a loss of US$158 million in the previous year. The company added in the statement that it had 73 million daily users and more than 100,000 active communities.

“We are going public to advance our mission and become a stronger company. We hope going public will provide meaningful benefits to our community as well,” said Reddit’s CEO Steve Huffman in a letter. “Our users have a deep sense of ownership over the communities they create on Reddit. This sense of ownership often extends to all of Reddit. We see this in our users’ passion for their communities, their desire for Reddit to be as amazing as possible, and in their disapproval when we let them down. We want this sense of ownership to be reflected in real ownership – for our users to be our owners. Becoming a public company makes this possible.”

Reddit said it would reserve a chunk of its shares at the IPO price for its top users, including moderators and those with high karma scores (which represents how much they have contributed to the Reddit community).

Founded in 2005, the social media began as a destination for anonymous users to discuss any topic. It initially focused on different sources of income derived from the ideas of its communities, such as a user-generated e-commerce system. And eventually, it leveraged its thematic communities to adopt advertising. Brands such as Laneige, for example, targeted ads to forums where users discussed about cosmetics and how to apply them.

The site has also created a data licensing business based on conversations that have taken place on the platform. This week, the company announced a licensing deal with Google to make its data available to the search engine giant’s AI models. The agreement with Google is worth about US$60 million per year.

Reddit is the latest social network to target the stock market after Snap’s 2017 offering, Twitter’s in 2013 and Facebook’s in 2012.

The platform could go public on the New York Stock Exchange under the stock symbol RDDT.