Community-driven social platform Reddit announces record growth and profits
Reddit, the 20 year old community-driven social platform known for its niche interest groups, has posted strong growth and profits in earnings results released on Tuesday.
These impressive results highlighting that it is increasingly a serious platform for advertisers.
The company has reported a profit of $29.9 million, along with $348.4 million in revenue - a 68% increase year on year.
Reddit has grown to 97.2 million daily users in 2024 - a 47% increase from the same time last year. It has reported reaching 100 million Daily Active Users (DAUs) this quarter.
Reddit’s advertising revenues grew 56% year-on-year to $315.1m, accounting for 90% of company revenues.
Its mid-market and small-to-medium-sized business ad revenue grew by 80% versus the same period in 2023.
Why Reddit matters to brands
Whilst Reddit is still dwarfed by Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp), its quicker rate of growth reflects both the site’s technical improvements and advertisers’ increased interest in reaching Reddit’s niche engaged communities, known as ‘subreddits’.
Reddit’s core community offer is apparently driving this growth.
Reddit allows advertisers a simple way to reach and speak to a massive range of interest-based communities and groups of individuals.
An example of a subreddit, a community on Reddit for Gen X women called ‘GenXWomen’
Can Reddit navigate reputational hurdles?
Reddit has long been regarded as a difficult, niche space for advertisers, but these earnings results highlight that it is a growing destination for advertising dollars.
Reddit has had its fair share of controversy over the years.
The platform allows users to mostly self-govern and moderate communities, which has has led to bad actors spreading misinformation, coordinating harassment, and ‘problematic content’.
In 2023, Reddit brought more controversy on itself by announcing new plans to charge for its API that led to a mass protest from users.
But its user base is changing, and new users have been attributed largely to improved Google visibility due to site speed.
Non-US markets are also powering Reddit’s growth. Non US DAUs grew 44% with France, India and the Philippines all benefitting from improved machine translations, set to expand to other countries in 2025.
2025 will be a pivotal year as Reddit will need to balance the needs of long time users - the community creators who have helped to grow the platform - and new advertisers/new users.
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Photo by Nick Fewings
