Reddit went public in March.
And while some were interested in its shares rising, marketers—like us—had the privilege of finally getting some more details about users and ads from the platform itself.
At the time, co-founder Steve Huffman praised the platform’s rapidly evolving ads business—encouraging advertisers to jump in.
And after the orange dust settled, we decided to look into the platform’s numbers, and see whether it might be good to shoot some dollars that way. Let’s begin.
🖱️📈 Clicking on each individual chart will take you to its interactive board.
Reddit’s daily active users keep growing
First signs, positive signs.
When it comes to user growth, Reddit has been having the best few quarters in its history.
And in the words of Sigmund Freud—there are no coincidences.
Everything is explainable.
A quick glance at this chart and you’ll be able to paint your own picture:
After years of flatlining its user base a magical thing happened:
Google has inadvertently shown to all SEO skeptics that if you dominate SERPs, you’re going to get traffic—and ultimately leads, sales, or other conversions. Nice.
But we’ll talk more about that in a few moments.
What’s good to know is that Reddit has a growing base of users—both US and globally, allowing you to cast a wider net in the pool of different subreddits and interests.
On the other hand, that’s far off the likes of platforms like Meta (3.24B), Snap (414M), or LinkedIn (134.5).
Still, some extensive growth is good to see.
The Google’s Core update impact on Reddit
In August 2023, Google launched a core update that… really shook SERP to the core.
After years of users adding “reddit” to the end of their queries to get some first-hand user comments, suggestions, or experiences—Google decided to make that maneuver obsolete.
Instead, it pushed Reddit—and other message boards and forums, but mostly Reddit—on top of the search results.
As you can guess, Reddit’s organic search traffic absolutely exploded:
More than a billion increase in organic visits in just half a year?
Reddit’s head of SEO must’ve felt like they’ve won the lottery.
That’s Semrush data from Statista.
We’ve fetched Ahrefs data, which is even more wild:
- August 2023: 102M
- May 2024: 584M
A 5.72x increase in 9 months. Wow.
This consequently made Reddit grab several percentage points visit share from other social platforms:
And finally, check this out:
At this moment, Reddit gets almost two-thirds of all its traffic from organic search.
So currently you have more people who land on Reddit while browsing for a specific question online, than regular users who hop on the platform with the intention to browse or discuss.
In that sense, Reddit is unique, almost blending search-based and social-based user behavior into one.
The Crew’s opinion: Content marketers and SEO experts might start seeing Reddit as a viable channel to drive traffic and brand awareness.
When popular Reddit threads pop up on the results page after typing your target keyword, you may want to engage with that thread—answer a question, provide value, mention your brand, even link when allowed.
It can both boost your brand awareness and maybe spill some topical authority from Reddit to your brand. At least short-term.
🔎 Did you know: People in the industry speculated that Google “awarded” Reddit due to a deal signed by two platforms, allowing the tech giant to scrap Reddit content to train its AI models.
The platform struck a similar deal with OpenAI, which is rumored to work on a search engine of its own. But everything is speculation. So far.
Reddit is dependent on its advertising businesses
Let’s talk about the greens.
Reddit’s advertising revenue has been increasing every year. And by quite a lot:
The platform’s ad spend grew 20% in 2023 compared to the previous year. And it is projected to increase another 28% this year—boosted by a healthier ad market and an election year.
Why is this good news? It shows that the platform provides enough advertising features for new advertisers to try it out and old advertisers to return for more.
And while we’re discussing dollars, here’s a little perspective:
Looking at that, how much do you think Reddit is reliant on ad dollars flowing?
No need to answer.
According to Marketing Brew, the ten biggest advertisers on Reddit accounted for a quarter of its entire ad revenue last year and the year before.
It appears that small and medium businesses still prefer working with “proven” players with sophisticated algorithms
More than half of Reddit’s users aren’t logged in
One of Reddit’s perks is that you can find answers without creating an account.
Which has somewhat of a negative consequence for the platform itself:
Apparently, over half of all users who land on Reddit aren’t actually Reddit users. They are just passers-by looking for quick, reliable answers.
The number of non-logged-in users grew 48% year-on-year. And you can guess why. It’s easier to land on Reddit from Google—which brings a lot of “anonymous” users to the fray.
Good news is that the logged-in Redditors grew by 27% compared to last year. Too.
What does it mean: While not being able to collect data of half of visiting users is definitely a downside for the platform, not all is bad.
With a cookieless future on the horizon, Reddit’s ability to provide contextual advertising could be a great way to tackle privacy concerns while also showing relevant ads.
For instance, a user who looks for gardening equipment on a designated subreddit might be shown your irrigation sprinkler advertising without the need to log in at all.
🧩 With contextual advertising, you display ads based on the content of the page.
Reddit uses an automated system that analyzes the subreddits to match them with relevant ads. Similarly, a cooking blog could show only kitchenware display ads.
At Stacked Marketer, for example, we only show ads that would interest our audience of marketers. And so on…
Who are you advertising to when you’re advertising on Reddit?
Let’s look at the profile of Reddit users for a while.
First, here’s the age range:
It appears the huge majority of Reddit’s users fall into the Gen Z and Millennials bracket.
Which means your ads should be targeted mostly to this demographic, except if you’re showing ads in niche subreddits populated by a certain, older population.
Keep that in mind when crafting copy and choosing the creative for your ad.
It should both align with the native “feel” of subreddits, but also with the values of these two generations.
Now let’s check their shopping plans:
It appears Redditors love spending—and can spend more on average than the general population. Especially on non-essential things.
Good to know if you’re selling higher-end products or services.
🗞️ Further reading: We’ve written about both millennials and Gen Zs in previous Data Stories. Check them out:
Redditors don’t really like ads
If you’d like to skip bad news, you can stop reading at this point.
Because here’s a not-so-positive chart:
Redditors aren’t fans of personalized ads and they’re also frequent users of ad blockers while browsing.
On the other hand, they love to recommend stuff themselves, value expert opinions, and like brands involved with social issues—which aligns with the platform’s dominant demographic.
It seems that brands have to try hard not to stand out with their ads on Reddit—but blend in.
The Crew’s opinion: There are definitely brands that will see bottom-end results from Reddit Ads. However, the overall feeling is that Reddit works best as a top-funnel content and brand awareness driver—either with paid ads or hard, content marketing efforts.
Advertisers love working with Reddit
We left some positive news for last.
Remember when we told you Reddit is hugely dependent on its ad dollars?
Well, that has its benefits—for advertisers at least:
A large number of big ad companies say that Reddit offers the best overall ad-buying experience.
The platform scores high in things such as:
- Understanding the context of which advertisers operate.
- Knowing the ins and outs of their own platform.
- Ease of getting in touch with an advertising representative.
…among other things.
If you ever ran ads on Meta or Google, you’ve probably had a situation where getting in touch with a representative felt like something out of Kafka’s novel.
Let alone solving anything promptly.
Well, it appears that Reddit is different, at least going by that report. And might offer you fewer hair-pulling moments unrelated to ad performance itself.
📌 Further reading: Honorable mention to Pinterest, who’s a close second on the list.
If you’re a brand that aligns with Pinterest’s unique audience, it might be time to test the platform. Check out our Data Story to learn more.
Now that you’ve read it…will you head over to Reddit?
After all this, Reddit’s main question remains—top or bottom?
Reddit’s growing user base and increased organic search traffic make it a promising platform for marketers seeking to drive traffic and build brand awareness.
But there’s still no accurate data telling us how effective these ads are for driving conversions.
However, despite the platform’s reliance on advertising revenue and the mixed reception of ads among users—Reddit offers a unique blend of search-based and social-based user behavior.
We can say that all this makes Reddit an effective channel for both top-funnel content marketing and targeted advertising efforts. But let us know what you think!
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Sources
- Stat Counter
- Statista
- Similarweb
- YouGov
- IPA
