Reddit CEO Steve Huffman: ‘People hate ads, but they love brands’
“The search ecosystem has been blown open for the first time in 20 years.”
At the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity this week, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman explained how the future of the company’s business model is not only contingent on its online communities, but the wealth of information they provide to be used in search.
“The misconception is that ChatGPT is taking searches away from Google. I don’t think that’s really happening,” he told WPP non-executive director Keith Weed. “What’s happening is people are running more searches on the internet. The internet is getting bigger.
“We spent the last 20 years learning how to talk to Google and ask questions to get the right answer out of it. But now there’s whole new class of question — this kind of open-ended, subjective question — that we as internet consumers can now ask and expect to get an answer out of.
“Now, that might come from Google; it might come from ChatGPT. But I actually think it will increasingly come from Reddit.”
Reddit Answers, the company’s search product, launched in December 2024 and remains in beta. It uses a large language model (LLM) trained on Reddit posts that allows users to ask questions and receive “curated summaries of relevant conversations and details”.
According to Huffman, the tool is “very good at real-time subjective queries” — questions where a conversation provides the most holistic response. These could include relatively mundane queries like “What is the best backpack?” or recommendations for “Where should I travel on holiday with a given budget?”
“There will be lots of new players in search,” Huffman said. “I hope we can be one of them.”
The reliability of Reddit’s crowdsourced answers to queries has led to Google users increasingly tagging “Reddit” on to the end of searches to get more trustworthy answers that haven’t been impacted by SEO or written by AI.
Huffman claimed that “Reddit” is currently the sixth-most-searched term on Google, sitting right between “news” and “Trump”.
“People have learned that if you have a question, Reddit likely has the answer,” he continued. “Basically, if you’re using the internet, you’re probably using Google. If you’re using Google, you’re probably using Reddit.”
‘Natural human conversation is extremely commercial’
Reddit’s business journey to become a serious competitor to more dominant platforms has been long and distracted. The platform turns 20 next week and is just a year younger than Facebook but, according to Huffman, “we didn’t start behaving as a business until 10 years ago”.
He said Reddit was “dragged” into commercialisation in order to survive, but that he has sought to maintain a “purity” to the platform as a place to “provide interesting content and a fun experience”.
Nevertheless, the company floated in the winter and its share price has more than tripled since then amid rapid revenue growth.
In its Q1 earnings report, revenue jumped 61% year on year to $392.4m, the vast majority of which came from advertising. While that is still small compared with competitors like Meta ($42.3bn) or even Snap ($1.36bn), the rate of growth has been suggestive of brands’ willingness to test the platform.
This is despite Reddit leadership remaining firmly committed to prioritising user experience before commercial results — at least for now. As Huffman explained: “Our first job is to help the user solve their problem and our second job is to help our business solve our problem.”
For him, the question at the centre of Reddit’s business strategy is: “How do we humanise brands?”
Quoting one of Reddit’s former creative strategists, he endorsed the idea that “people hate ads, but they love brands”.
Despite Reddit’s relatively “non-commercial vibe”, Huffman noted that about half the conversations on Reddit essentially revolve around the basic question of: “What should I buy?”
“It turns out that natural human conversation is extremely commercial”, he said.
According to research conducted by Reddit and released ahead of Cannes Lions, consumers are increasingly turning to Reddit to validate purchase decisions.
Rob Gaige, the platform’s global head of insights, told The Media Leader that Reddit is thus “complementary” to ad campaigns elsewhere, with users often echoing brand messaging on Reddit months after campaigns.
Dubbing this a correlational “ripple effect” across media plans, Gaige suggested that brands consider Reddit a “long-term permanent strategy” that is additive to wider marketing efforts.
For Huffman, working with Reddit is “pretty straightforward”: identify the different communities (referred to as subreddits), topics or niches you want to target and “be present there”.
To help marketers understand more about where and how to show up, this week Reddit launched Community Intelligence, which encompasses two “early-stage products”: an AI-powered social listening tool dubbed Reddit Insights and a new ad format called Conversation Summary Add-Ons.
Huffman advised that, apart from the “golden rule” of having a “genuine offer” to solve a problem for the customer, brands should embrace what is unique about Reddit and “lead with kindness” on the platform.
Instead of, for example, “pushing into a community” with a sales pitch, they should consider asking questions of users or giving prompts for conversations in relevant subreddits.
“It starts with knowing that these are humans, they’re in a community, this is a special space,” he said. “They’re not anti-brand; they just want to make sure the relationship is fair and transparent.”
Gaige added: “You never know when someone is going to be in the market for something and you never know at what point they’re going to look into subreddits to get those answers.
“The question is: when they go to those subreddits, are they going to be prepared to echo your marketing messages or [that of] your competitors?”
Preference for ‘human intelligence’
The human nature of Reddit conversations is core to its strategy in an era when the rules of the internet are set to be rewritten by AI. Huffman said Reddit is going to “double and triple down” on the importance of “people talking to people”, sharing knowledge and opinions.
But while Reddit wants to remain “a human place”, the platform is paradoxically among the most useful sources of training data for the LLMs the platform is competing with in the new era of search.
Huffman suggested that Reddit makes up a plurality of the data Perplexity and ChatGPT uses in response to queries. This in part due to the platform’s scale, with Reddit generating “a Wikipedia of information every two weeks”.
“Twenty years of people having these conversations about everything has created one of the most comprehensive and valuable corpuses of information on the internet,” he added. But, for him, the usefulness of AI for brands is arguably oversold.
“Artificial intelligence — the answer is in the name; it’s artificial,” Huffman continued. “What you want is real human intelligence.”
Who are the humans at the centre of Reddit’s intelligence? Currently, Reddit’s audience skews dramatically towards the US market, which accounts for about half of its user base.
Huffman plans to grow non-US users so that they eventually comprise 80-90% of the platform’s user base — and doing so will require hands-on efforts to engage new communities in different markets and expand automatic non-English translation efforts. Both of these are ongoing projects.
The sweet spot for Reddit is “emerging adults” — essentially anyone aged 17 or older. According to estimates, the average age of Redditors is around 23; over 40% of users are 18-29, with a male skew.
While the user base is still young, core users are arguably older than those at the likes of TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat — ubiquitous apps among teenagers.
Suggesting that Reddit is distinct from “social media” (however that may be defined), Huffman explained: “Where people may age out of social media, they actually age in to Reddit. And then once we get you, we tend to keep you for basically their lives.”
He posited that Reddit’s text-heavy nature “kind of remove[s] the kids” because it demands users to spend time typing or reading rather than, say, watching videos.
“In not fighting over the teenage users, we’ve carved out a slice of the market,” Huffman observed.
He added that, amid widespread concern over child safety online, Reddit has taken the stance that it’s easiest to handle the problem by “just not hav[ing] kids” — although there is anecdotal evidence of a subset of teens using the platform.
“One of the big differences between us and social media is Reddit is not organised around friends and followers,” Huffman continued. “The ‘friends and followers’ model is very powerful. It leads to exponential growth.
“That’s why you’ve seen social media — Facebook, Twitter, Insta, TikTok — they all broadly are younger than Reddit and have grown past Reddit… something we used to be insecure about.
“Reddit is communities — and communities are slower growers. They are a real human phenomenon.”