Reddit CEO says its main competition is 'free time and office productivity'
- Reddit's CEO said the company's main competition is "free time and office productivity."
- "We've probably sucked more hours out of work than any other company," he continued.
- Reddit is planning an IPO but the "time frame is pretty far out."
Reddit's CEO, Steve Huffman, doesn't see social networks like Facebook or Twitter as the biggest threats to Reddit, the eighth most popular website on the internet.
Instead, he said he sees "free time and office productivity" as Reddit's main competition in an interview on Monday.
"I think it's really free time and office productivity," Huffman said onstage at The Internet Association's Virtuous Circle Summit 2017. "We've probably sucked more hours out of work than any other company. And we're very proud of that."
"We say, Reddit is the most productive way to spend your downtime. As tech companies, sure, there's the who's-who list that we're competing for some users over, but really it's all media. Where do you go when you want to learn something. Where do you go when you want to be entertained? What do you do when you wake up in the morning, what do you do before you go to bed, what do you do when you're pooping. Those are all pretty big areas of opportunity for us," Huffman continued.
In the same interview, Huffman said that Reddit was considering an IPO, although he said that the "time frame is pretty far out."
Huffman also spent some time talking about how Reddit makes money through its advertising business, which has propelled revenue to increase five-fold over the past few years. He said that some of Reddit's biggest advertisers - its clients - are media companies, like Netflix.
He's also clearly taking a page out of the Netflix CEO's book. Earlier this year, Reed Hastings said that Netflix was in competition with sleep for users and people's time. Reddit is reportedly valued at $1.8 billion.
Watch the entire interview below: