>User growth is, if anything, better than even bulls anticipated. SensorTower data has Reddit just north of 120mn daily active users; Dan Salmon of New Street Research, who Rob spoke to in 2024, estimated it would hit 131mn by 2027.
>Reddit makes a profit. And Wall Street, for what it’s worth, thinks you should buy.
>Where other social networks get sizeable engagement via their apps (with all the lovely opportunities those bring for user profiling, targeted advertising and pushing premium product tiers 😋), Reddit users are shopping through the (browser) window.
>Those readers who do their own shopping may recognise the dynamic here. Reddit is the pre-eminent, ubiquitous SEO-friendly forum for product discussions, and adding “reddit” to the end of ecommerce searches is an integral part of many an ecommerce journey. In a sprawling world of digital retail offerings and fake reviews, people want people. Reddit also maintains a role as a space for user-moderated community discussions on often esoteric themes, a dynamic which is roughly the opposite of what control-freak advertisers want.
>But the site is in a bind over sustained engagement: require everyone searching “leather turf football boots reddit” to install the Reddit app to read discussions is a quick way to get nobody to click on your links. But without ways to get a grip on people passing through, Reddit has a tendency to serve users for mere seconds. And that’s tough when nearly all of its income is derived from advertising.
>It leaves Reddit at the mercy of two pretty unlovely and increasingly intertwined intermediaries: search and AI. The proliferation of generated search summaries means that for users who — quite reasonably — just want to know what’s a good, inexpensive [kettle/time of year to visit Canada/haircare routine] in this crazy world can now get that information from Reddit without even the small step of actually going on Reddit.
>Reddit’s bosses face a difficult task — the site has arguably reached struggle size and it’s increasingly in direct competition with some of the world’s biggest companies. A grim but imaginable future is one where Reddit is rarely visited, but is seen as such a font of LLM recommendations that manipulated discussions become its raison d’être. And as long as people buy the right [toasters/soaps/socks], that might work for the company and the advertisers. For people, less good.
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Some interesting excerpts:
>User growth is, if anything, better than even bulls anticipated. SensorTower data has Reddit just north of 120mn daily active users; Dan Salmon of New Street Research, who Rob spoke to in 2024, estimated it would hit 131mn by 2027.
>Reddit makes a profit. And Wall Street, for what it’s worth, thinks you should buy.
>Where other social networks get sizeable engagement via their apps (with all the lovely opportunities those bring for user profiling, targeted advertising and pushing premium product tiers 😋), Reddit users are shopping through the (browser) window.
>Those readers who do their own shopping may recognise the dynamic here. Reddit is the pre-eminent, ubiquitous SEO-friendly forum for product discussions, and adding “reddit” to the end of ecommerce searches is an integral part of many an ecommerce journey. In a sprawling world of digital retail offerings and fake reviews, people want people. Reddit also maintains a role as a space for user-moderated community discussions on often esoteric themes, a dynamic which is roughly the opposite of what control-freak advertisers want.
>Reddit recognises this delicate dynamic, and [has vowed to remain “distinctly human”](https://www.ft.com/content/a86fb03a-8781-40b5-a077-1d677e546ecf), even as grows ad revenue and [strikes deals to license its sprawling corpus of discussion to feed AI models](https://www.ft.com/content/2fb9b1d2-e191-4932-9e08-6cc295d94d2b). It is currently in legal battles with Perplexity and Anthropic over alleged unlawful use of its data.
>But the site is in a bind over sustained engagement: require everyone searching “leather turf football boots reddit” to install the Reddit app to read discussions is a quick way to get nobody to click on your links. But without ways to get a grip on people passing through, Reddit has a tendency to serve users for mere seconds. And that’s tough when nearly all of its income is derived from advertising.
>It leaves Reddit at the mercy of two pretty unlovely and increasingly intertwined intermediaries: search and AI. The proliferation of generated search summaries means that for users who — quite reasonably — just want to know what’s a good, inexpensive [kettle/time of year to visit Canada/haircare routine] in this crazy world can now get that information from Reddit without even the small step of actually going on Reddit.
>Reddit’s bosses face a difficult task — the site has arguably reached struggle size and it’s increasingly in direct competition with some of the world’s biggest companies. A grim but imaginable future is one where Reddit is rarely visited, but is seen as such a font of LLM recommendations that manipulated discussions become its raison d’être. And as long as people buy the right [toasters/soaps/socks], that might work for the company and the advertisers. For people, less good.
[A copy of the full article](https://archive.is/jQI2X) for those interested.