Reddit, Inc. (Reddit) operates a digital community.
The company is a global, digital city where anyone in the world can join a community to learn from one another, engage in authentic conversations, explore passions, research new hobbies, exchange goods and services, create new communities and experiences, share a few laughs, and find belonging. At Reddit, users can dive into anything, and if a community does not already exist around a particular topic, they can create one. In the three months...
Reddit, Inc. (Reddit) operates a digital community.
The company is a global, digital city where anyone in the world can join a community to learn from one another, engage in authentic conversations, explore passions, research new hobbies, exchange goods and services, create new communities and experiences, share a few laughs, and find belonging. At Reddit, users can dive into anything, and if a community does not already exist around a particular topic, they can create one. In the three months ended December 31, 2024, an average of 101.7 million daily active uniques (‘DAUq’) around the world came together on Reddit – continuously adding to the company’s longstanding and constantly evolving human archive of information. They come together to share the rhythm of their daily discoveries, ask questions and receive advice, research before making a purchase decision, hear reactions to recent events, and thrive as a community. Built on shared interests, passion, and trust, Reddit has a community for everyone.
Communities on Reddit are organized based on specific interests and are called subreddits. Within subreddits, Redditors engage in active and in-depth conversations by sharing experiences, submitting links, uploading images and videos, and replying to one another in comment threads on any topic. Subreddits are denoted by an ‘r/’ before their names: r/explainlikeimfive helps people learn anything with child-friendly explanations; r/lgbt helps people find their identity; and r/BeyondTheBump helps people transition from pregnancy to parenthood. Redditors invest time to shape their communities, share their experiences, send support and supplies when someone is down on their luck, and even code scripts and develop tools to advance their communities.
Reddit is made from code and algorithms, but is really built by its users. It is a place where human ingenuity and creativity thrive. It empowers users to participate and to shape Reddit by sharing content, upvoting or downvoting, and commenting. In addition, Redditors themselves not only create and build communities, but they also moderate these communities as volunteers to help keep them safe, vibrant, and true to themselves. Newly created subreddits create a sense of belonging for their members, spurring the creation of more new subreddits to continue the cycle. In this way, Reddit’s community ecosystem grows and expands with the interests and passions of its users, keeping Reddit on trend and resilient to fading fads.
Reddit’s community ecosystem is organically built upon shared interests, passions, and trust rather than friends, celebrities, and their followers. This distinction results in a unique sense of belonging, privacy, and authenticity for its users.
Powerful Platform Built Around Context and User Interest
Reddit is a unique platform for advertisers due to its intentional, authentic, trusted nature, and its strength in contextual and interest-based advertising. For advertisers, it provides access to a unique and highly engaged audience where its trusted, passionate communities drive recommendations on brands and buying decisions.
A Valuable Source of Conversational Data and Knowledge
Over time, Reddit has evolved to become one of the internet’s largest corpuses of information, with over two billion posts and over 20 billion comments through December 31, 2024, and an average of 1.2 million posts created daily and 9.7 million comments created daily in December 2024. The company’s content is particularly important for artificial intelligence (‘AI’) – it is a foundational part of how many of the leading large language models (‘LLMs’) have been trained. Furthermore, the company uses internally built and trained models to improve many aspects of Reddit, including user onboarding, content translation, and moderation and safety. The company’s massive corpus of conversational data and knowledge is what makes it unique, and its value will continue to grow over time as the company’s user-generated data continues to grow.
Entrepreneurial User Economy
The company is developing a user-powered economy on Reddit by providing its communities and creators with the requisite tools and incentives to drive continued creation and experiences. The Contributor Program enables people to earn money when other users reward their posts or comments. It has also enabled the ability to pay for applications created in the Reddit Development Platform. These initiatives will open additional monetization channels for the company.
Why Users Come to Reddit
The company has search engines to find content and social networks to share and follow each other. Its community of communities sets itself apart with its unique combination of characteristics and is designed to provide users with a trusted place to be authentic to themselves in sharing and discovering while maintaining their privacy.
With over two billion posts and over 20 billion comments organized into communities, Reddit content provides authentic, human perspectives across almost any topic imaginable. The company’s constantly updated user-generated content provides a vast collection of human experiences, answers, and conversations and provides a source of fresh ideas. Reddit’s influence and relevance organically grows, and Reddit quickly responds to new topics based on real experiences. Topical communities such as r/ travel, r/ vanderpumprules, r/ MachineLearning, r/ cricket, r/ boxoffice, and r/ TaylorSwift have had meaningful breakouts as the headlines have evolved. As a result of Reddit’s scale and longevity, the company’s content library is a broad memory of human interest, organically expanding and deepening into more topics. At times, Reddit may be the only place to find the information users are looking for, and users searching for information often come to Reddit and discover conversations taking place there.
Reddit is home to over 100,000 active subreddits, with over 500 subreddits that each have at least one million subscribers, which cover a wide variety of topics—r/ wholesomememes, r/ philosophy, r/ Cats, r/ InteriorDesign, r/ NBA, and r/ worldnews, to name a few—and can be creative, humorous, informative, inspirational, absurd, serious, or contemplative.
The company’s differentiated community approach underlies the interactions on its platform: Reddit is centered around human creativity and belonging. The content found in Reddit communities is curated by people, creating a highly relevant content experience that attracts users to the company’s platform. Every post and comment on Reddit, regardless of the author, starts with one upvote, and must earn its visibility through community members upvoting it and boosting it to the subreddit’s front page. Unlike traditional social media, voting (both up and down) is completely anonymous, encouraging broader Redditor participation.
The company gives communities the ability to choose the format for conversations in their communities—text, image, video, opinion polls, chatrooms—which enables them to create dynamic and engaging experiences. It gives moderators the creative tools to design the look and feel of communities, and it gives developers an open application programming interface (‘API’) to build bots and create features that shape their communities, meaning what a community envisions for itself drives its unique development.
Conversations flow across Reddit through cross-posting, where a post from one community can be shared into another community to spur new conversation with a different audience.
The company is committed to continuously enhancing its policies and processes to promote the safety of users and moderators, and the health of its platform.
Strategy
The company’s strategy is to support the growth and engagement of its communities. The key elements of the company’s strategy are to grow awareness and engagement of Reddit by improving discovery and user experience, and customized content recommendations; reinventing search; and grow its international user base.
Why Advertisers Come to Reddit
Reddit is the place where people, entities of public interest, and businesses come together to engage in authentic human-to-human conversations structured around their interests. Across the company’s diverse communities, people seek and share information in context about products and services, often with high purchase intent. The company has made investments and acquisitions that have enabled it to be a leader in contextual and interest-based advertising. Advertisers of all sizes rely on Reddit to find highly engaged, high-intent customers in conversations that drive decisions at every stage of the path to purchase.
The Future of The company’s Platform and Monetization Strategies
Advertising
Reddit is a unique place on the internet, and the company has many avenues to increase value to advertisers through the company’s interest- and community-based platform. The company continues to expand its ad platform capabilities to enable more ways for customers to invest to grow their business on Reddit. The company is still in the early phases of its opportunity and plan to pursue the following eight levers to expand the company’s monetization and average revenue per unique:
More Context and Interest. The company plans to continue to add additional contextual and interest-based signals and intelligence into the company’s advertiser platform. This will help advertisers find more relevant audiences on Reddit. This includes existing placements in the home feed and in conversations, as well as potential future opportunities (e.g., ads on search pages; video ads).
Deliver ROI with Marketplace Optimizations. The company is in the early stages of using machine learning and prediction models to better match supply and demand and deliver return on investment (‘ROI’) for the company’s advertisers. The company is focused on using its powerful prediction models to work across objectives, placements, and formats – helping to better predict conversion rates of an ad (e.g., installs; purchases).
Advertiser Diversity and Depth. The company plans to increase the types, sizes, and geographies of advertisers the company reaches and expands annual partnerships for longer-term visibility. The company intends to grow its advertisers from endemic advertisers in verticals where the company has the largest number of active communities, like technology and communications; business, legal, and finance; and media and entertainment, to newer verticals such as automotive; retail; consumer packaged goods; pharmaceuticals; and food and beverage. The company is focused on geographic markets where the company has teams, channel partners, or vendors to help manage small- and mid-size businesses globally.
Demonstrate ROI. By improving the measurement of the company’s ads, the company can provide better data to show the company’s advertisers the ROI of their presence on Reddit. The company has invested in measurement capabilities that enable advertisers to better understand the impact of their Reddit campaign. This includes expanding Conversion API ecosystem to new partners, improving Pixel implementation, investing in the foundation of on-platform conversion-lift, and on-platform brand lift.
AI-Powered Audience Reach and Bidding. The company is using machine learning models for contextual keyword audience reach and interest-based audience reach, ranking ads based on brand suitability and machine learning-predicted user engagement. Additionally, machine learning-powered ‘auto-bidding’ (e.g., Maximum Clicks and Maximum Conversions) helps advertisers maximize campaign objectives and ROI while avoiding extensive manual testing.
Expanded Formats and Offerings. The company plans to continue to develop new ad positions based on evolving consumer behaviors on the platform (e.g., search usage growth). The company plans to expand its ad formats in ways that allow advertisers to creatively talk to communities and share more information (e.g., product-level creative; AMAs).
Automation/Scale Service Model. Through easier onboarding, setup, campaign management, and optimization, the company expects to scale its service model through diverse service channels matched to client needs – from managed service models, to hybrid, to enabling advertisers to activate with little to no sales team assistance (i.e., unmanaged). This simplifies core manual optimization tasks needed for more outcomes and better performance.
Acquire More Advertisers. With more automation in the future, the company can become even more accessible to a larger portion of small- and medium-sized businesses enabled by partnerships and accelerated demand generation. The company is also deepening its relationships with large agencies through solutions that enable enterprise operations across large clients.
Content Licensing
Reddit is one of the internet’s largest corpuses of authentic and constantly updated human-generated conversations, community, and content. In an increasingly data-driven world, the company recognizes that this information is increasingly important for a multitude of different uses and applications. The internet should work for consumers and they should be able to find the information they need or experiences they want. And, organizations need to prioritize sources of real-time human perspectives—from a company looking for feedback on a new consumer product to investors trying to capture market sentiments or signals—and Reddit provides a differentiated solution. Reddit data and information constantly grows and regenerates as users come and interact with their communities and each other in genuine and authentic ways. The company expects its growing data advantage to continue to be valuable across several applications of LLMs (e.g., search, run-time inference). The company continues to strategically explore content licensing agreements with collaborative partners in the ecosystem ranging from marketing intelligence companies to enterprise-scale technology companies. The company is also exploring go-to-market strategies for new verticals, including the financial services industry.
User Economy
Commerce has already emerged on the company’s platform organically as a result of the company’s interest-and community-based approach. Artisans sell their creations, collectors sell beloved items, and developers sell entertainment via originally developed video games. This activity has been taking place in communities dedicated to creativity, memorabilia, and fandoms for many years. The company intends to support the Reddit user economy by providing the company’s users and creators with the requisite tools and incentives to drive continued creation, improvements, and commerce. In turn, this will open additional monetization channels for Reddit:
Developer Platform. The company is providing developers with additional tools and increased monetization opportunities to unlock creativity on Reddit and incentivize continued improvements to the overall user experience and utility of the platform.
Contributor Program. As creators, builders, and developers generate value on the company’s platform, the company intends to empower these groups to participate in their value creation by receiving monetary benefits from Reddit and other community members. Increasingly, talented individuals are turning to online communities to share their creations with fans, peer creators, and enthusiasts. The company is focused on increasing the types of ways that users can recognize contributors with real-world money to incentivize and reward quality content creation.
Community Experiences. The company has a Collectible Avatars Creator Program, which empowers users to create, own, and monetize their artistic creations, and for which the company receives a portion of the primary sales and royalty fees. The company is also exploring ways to enable communities to offer subscriptions to premium experiences and engage with other paying members.
Competition
The company is competing for people’s time and for global advertising spend. As such, it faces significant competition across many areas of its business. Examples of select competitors across several time spent categories include:
For Seeking Information—Google, Amazon, YouTube, Wikipedia, X, and other news sites. Some users are also turning to LLMs such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Anthropic.
For Entertainment—Meta (including Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp), YouTube, Snap, X, TikTok, Roblox, and Twitch.
For Passions and Hobbies—Facebook Groups, Discord, X, and Pinterest.
For Peer-to-peer Commerce and User Economy—Facebook Marketplace, Nextdoor, Craigslist, Poshmark, Etsy, and Roblox.
The company competes directly with all other major advertising platforms as well as publishers, including Google, Meta, Snapchat, TikTok, Pinterest, and X.
Seasonality
The company has historically seen seasonality in its business and financial results, with an increase in overall advertiser spending in the fourth quarter (year ended December 2024), due in large part to end-of-year advertiser spending, typically followed by a weaker first quarter.
Intellectual Property
As of December 31, 2024, the company had 51 pending trademark applications and 346 trademark registrations around the world. It also had 123 copyright registrations on various graphical designs and literary works and two pending utility patent applications and three provisional patent applications in the United States as of December 31, 2024.
‘REDDIT’, the Reddit logos, and other trade names, trademarks, or service marks are the property of Reddit or its affiliates.
History
Reddit, Inc. was founded in 2005. The company was incorporated as a Delaware corporation in 2011.
