How a Legacy Media Company Dwarfed Venture Capitalists’ Returns on Reddit

The world was a much different place when media titan Condé Nast bought fledgling internet forum Reddit for around $10 million in 2006. Media companies were still figuring out the internet—Condé had just bought the website for Wired, a magazine it already owned—and glossy print titles like Vogue and an arsenal of newspapers were raking in advertising profits for Condé’s parent company, Advance Publications.

Nearly two decades later, traditional media is hobbled. But Advance just notched a huge win: It racked up a gain of $1.4 billion on the money it invested over the years in Reddit, far outpacing a cap table full of notable investors. The deal returned six to seven times the gains of the next biggest winner, a set of funds run by OpenAI founder Sam Altman, and 17 times the gains of Sequoia Capital, which invested about midway through Reddit’s 19-year existence, according to calculations and estimates by The Information.