Reddit raised $300 million at a $3 billion valuation, and now it's aiming to take on Facebook and Google

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Reddit wants to build a big advertising business

Reddit announced Monday that it has raised $300 million at a $3 billion valuation, up from a $1.8 billion valuation in 2017, when the company took in a $200 million investment.

Why it matters: Reddit has focused its efforts over the past year on cleaning up its platform to build a better advertising model.

• The 23-year-old social platform has been criticized in the past for lax regulation around hate speech, piracy, harassment, and even more recently, election interference - things advertisers don't like to be associated with.

Between the lines: Reddit has roughly 330 million monthly active users (MAUs), which means it's about the same size as Twitter - but its efforts to monetize those users haven't been great yet.

By the numbers: CNBC reports that the company's annual revenue is roughly $100 million, meaning each user is worth around 30 cents. By comparison, average revenue per MAU, as of the fourth quarter of 2018...

• Facebook: $7.37
• Twitter: $2.83

A big part of Reddit's value to advertisers is the demographic of its audience, which is mostly users ages 18-34. On its website, Reddit says 63% of its users are under 25 and 87% are under 35.

The big picture: The company has pushed aggressively over the past year to both clean up its site and focus on more lucrative advertising opportunities, primarily video.

• The company said last year that it was averaging over 1 billion native video views and almost 1 million video uploads each month on its platform.
• It credits a recent redesign for being a significant driver for adoption for both video creators and consumers, saying that the redesign helped foster 50% increase in video posts over the "old" Reddit.