Reddit, the social news site with a big Web footprint, is raising a big funding round — with help from some of the people who helped launch the site nine years ago, including co-founder Alexis Ohanian and other people associated closely with startup incubator Y Combinator.

Sources said the almost-anything-goes site has reached a preliminary agreement to sell less than 10 percent of the company for more than $50 million. That could give the company a valuation of upward of $500 million.

Given investors’ new-found appetite for content companies — see: BuzzFeed, Twitch — Reddit’s valuation may swell significantly by the time the deal is done, well above the $400 million it was looking for in 2013.

The funding is a big deal, since Reddit plays an important role on the Web because of its size and heft. The site, which consists solely of user-supplied photos, links and discussions, has said it has 133 million visitors a month. It also acts as a reliable content generator for publishers like BuzzFeed, which repackages stuff Redditors submit to their site.

A link farm worth $500 million. I guess were worth 1 billion then?

Source: Business Insider