One of the hottest tech stocks at the top of the market these days is Reddit (RDDT -7.18%). The company has seen its share price rise more than 170% since its IPO in March, with much of that rise coming after its earnings release in late October.

The stock’s momentum has pushed it to a market capitalization of over $24 billion. Such progress is reminiscent of the rise (admittedly in the much longer term) of powerful Apple (AAPL 0.59%). Yes, Apple is a nearly $3.5 trillion company today, but if Reddit continues to grow in popularity, it could perhaps match, or even surpass, the tech powerhouse’s market value by the end of this decade.

A star on the rise on social networks

For those who may not be familiar with it, Reddit runs an online forum in which users post and respond on a dizzying number of topics. This perfectly fills a niche opened by search engines like AlphabetGoogle, which may provide results that are quick answers to queries, but generally offer little depth or discussion.

Reddit took this simple concept and built a fast-growing business off of it. The company earns revenue from advertising, which is common in the social media world, but also makes money by licensing the data it collects from users and offering paid “premium” subscriptions. to the user base, among other activities.

Those third quarter results which had the market so excited, revealed that Reddit saw a significant growth of 68% year-over-year to reach over $348 million. Better yet, when it was all said and done, the profit was almost $30 million, compared to a loss of $7 million and a change from last year.

Investors were excited by these results, not only because of the satisfactory growth figures, but also because of the way in which they were achieved. Reddit has been very successful in growing its user base, with Daily Averages (DAU; better known as Daily Average) users in the broader sense social networks sphere) increasing by 47% to reach more than 97 million people.

Even more impressive, the growth rates and total DAUs in the company’s home U.S. and abroad were roughly equal. Reddit, as a product, is scaling admirably across the planet, it seems. Operational metrics like DAU are very important to advertisers, and all things being equal, a larger, regular user base means more money for the site serving the ad.

Furthermore, while average revenue per user (ARPU) didn’t grow as impressively, it still rose 14% globally to $3.58. Here’s another great opportunity for the company, as its third-quarter ARPU on our shores far exceeded that of the international market, from $5.88 to $1.32. As Reddit’s popularity continues to rise overseas, its ARPU is expected to see a proportionate increase.

Another rather promising source of income for Reddit is data licensing. Advertising accounted for the majority (89%) of third-quarter revenue, but the “other” revenue category – containing data licenses – increased by 547%.

While we shouldn’t continue to expect such large numbers, Reddit has a wealth of data thanks to its users, and licensing to train artificial intelligence (AI) is still in its infancy . There is certainly huge potential for the future.

A dizzying mountain to climb

With these considerable headwinds weighing heavily on its back, it’s no surprise that Reddit is now a hot topic among investors.

Yet becoming the next Apple – the dream of many tech entrepreneurs – is like climbing the world’s largest mountain. This $3.5 trillion price tag comes from decades of Apple building brand recognitionso much so that almost everyone on our planet has not only heard of the company, but is instantly familiar with its products.

It also stems from the long-term success of what was a revolutionary product in its early days – the iPhone – and the development of a lucrative ecosystem built around it. Starting a business this way isn’t cheap, easy, or quick; it takes a lot of vision and capital – not to mention luck.

So even if we give Reddit a generous amount of time to reach Apple’s lofty perch, I don’t think it will achieve those heights. Management has done a remarkable and smart job of capturing business opportunities and exploiting them, but advertisers are fickle and prone to jumping to the Next Cool Thing in order to capture potential customers. Data licensing is certainly a high-potential business, but it remains to be seen to what extent Reddit will exploit this opportunity.

Ultimately, Apple will continue to be a behemoth compared to Reddit’s modest size, both immediately and in the medium and long term. This doesn’t mean Reddit is a stock to ignore, however. Quite the contrary: it has attracted market attention for all the right reasons. It’s a future social media giant in the making if it continues on its current path, and is worth considering as a buy.