An online gambling site is taking bets on the future of Reddit
With more than 8,400 subreddits going dark to protest Reddit’s decision to start charging some third-party apps for access to the company’s application programming interface (API), the “front page of the internet” is looking pretty threadbare this week.
That may improve, in some cases, late Tuesday and early Wednesday as the 48-hour protest draws to a close, but many popular subreddits—including r/music, with over 30 million subscribers—say they will stop operating “indefinitely” until the situation is resolved, noting that their moderators are unable to do their work with the tools on Reddit’s official app.
So now, an online gambling site is laying odds and taking wagers about what happens next. And according to the oddsmakers, at least, it doesn’t look good for Reddit.
BetUS.com has opened up novelty bets (for real money) on three Reddit-themed areas:
The odds listed are American moneyline odds, which can be confusing to some people. As BetUS points out, “A negative number indicates the favorite and a positive number indicates the underdog. When betting on the favorite, the negative number will indicate how much you will have to risk to win $100.”
Regarding the API pricing, there really are no good odds. The moneyline bet, as of Tuesday afternoon, that Reddit would reverse its plans in the next 17 days is -130 (meaning you’d need to bet $130 for a $100 payout). People who bet against that occurring are looking at a moneyline of -110.
Reddit has already made a few concessions, notably making an exception for accessibility apps. But no others seem to be on the horizon. Reddit, in a statement Monday, said, “We’re not planning any changes to the API updates we’ve previously announced.”
There’s a sense of pessimism about the fate of the Apollo app, which the founder says he plans to close down on June 30 (after posting a long Reddit thread explaining why several days ago). The moneyline bet on the app not shutting down is the underdog at +150 (so a $100 wager would net a $150 profit). The line for Apollo calling it quits is -200.
As for Huffman’s fate, BetUS oddsmakers like his chances of staying in charge. The moneyline for him being ousted by the end of the year is currently the underdog at +170, with a -260 moneyline for him to stay.
Obviously, the odds on BetUS aren’t going to directly impact anything at Reddit. But the blackout and user rebellion come at a perilous time for the site, which makes Huffman’s fate especially interesting.
Reddit filed for an IPO in December 2021, listing a valuation of up to $15 billion, and was expected to go public in March 2022—but then the market chop happened. Fidelity cut its estimated share price in the company by one-third last May, and the great wait was extended. (Fidelity backed off of the dire notes the following month, increasing Reddit’s share prices by 6.5%.)
Many investors expect Reddit to go public later this year. At the time of its filing, the site said it expected to exceed $1 billion in annual ad revenue by 2023. Though, with its largest subreddits offline, perhaps indefinitely in many cases, that’s going to be trickier.
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