Tech and AI

A discussion forum joins the S&P 500, and calls its users' writing the raw material

By Staff Writer  |  16 August 2026

Reddit enters the index before the market opens on Tuesday, an off cycle change caused by a constituent being acquired. The company reported total revenue above $2bn for 2025, up 69 per cent, and net income of $530m.

Reddit will be added to the S&P 500 with effect from Tuesday 18 August. The company confirmed the admission on Thursday. It is an off cycle change, prompted by the acquisition of an existing constituent rather than by a scheduled rebalancing, which is the usual route in for a company that has been public for a comparatively short time.

The chief financial officer put the case in the company's own announcement.

Reddit's raw materials are special, and there is so much potential to continue building great products and scaling profitably

Drew Vollero, Chief Financial Officer, Reddit

The numbers behind it

Total revenue for 2025 passed $2bn, a rise of 69 per cent year on year. Net income reached $530m, which the company describes as an improvement of more than $1bn on 2024. The second quarter of this year was the eighth consecutive quarter of revenue growth above 60 per cent year on year, with profitability on a generally accepted accounting principles basis and gross margins above 90 per cent throughout.

Ninety per cent gross margins are what a business looks like when its inventory is written by somebody else. The cost of goods sold here is storage, search and moderation, not production.

The company puts its archive at more than 26 billion posts and comments, describes that corpus as the thing its model is powered by, and says it plays an increasingly important part in the artificial intelligence ecosystem as more people look for human perspectives rather than generated ones. On its own account it is the third most visited website in the United States, citing a measurement taken in May.

What it means for the rest of us

Index membership is not a verdict on a business. It is a mechanical consequence of size, eligibility and, in this case, a vacancy created by somebody else being bought. What follows from it is less mechanical: funds that track the index have to hold the constituent, which is why an addition is announced ahead of the date it takes effect.

The wider point is worth a moment for anyone whose own organisation holds a large archive of written material. A back catalogue of ordinary conversation, contributed by people who were not paid for it, is what this company puts at the centre of its own description of itself on the day it enters one of the most closely tracked equity indices there is. Every business with two decades of correspondence, technical notes, specifications and dispute files is sitting on something structurally similar, and most have never asked what it is worth or who is entitled to sell it.

The question the admission does not answer

Nothing in Tuesday's change settles who ought to benefit from an archive of that kind. The company's own framing puts the value in the contributions rather than in the software around them, which is candid, and it raises the obvious question about the people who made the contributions. That question is being asked of every large text archive at the moment, and it is not going to be answered by an index committee.

Tuesday's change is a formality with a date on it. The figure worth keeping is the 26 billion.