Reddit looks to scale through search, performance and insight
The Media Leader Interview
Amid surges in user growth and revenue, Reddit is eyeing commercial growth in lower funnel campaigns, consumer insights, and its yet-to-be-monetised AI search product.
Reddit’s revenue growth is outpacing its rivals, albeit from a smaller base.
In its Q4 earnings, the growing social giant reported 70% year-on-year revenue growth to $726m, driven by a 75% increase in ad revenue to $690m.
For the full fiscal year, Reddit reported similar 69% year-on-year revenue growth to $2.2bn, $2.1bn of which derived from ad revenue.
Daily active unique users also grew 19% year on year to 121.4m — stark growth for a platform that is nearly 21 years old.
While such earnings are dwarfed by advertising giants like Meta ($59.9bn in Q4 alone) and even smaller competitors like Snap ($1.7bn in Q4) and Pinterest ($1.05bn in Q3), as Hannah Walker, Reddit’s head of mid-market UK, describes to The Media Leader, the platform has both consumer and commercial momentum.
“Our share of wallet in the UK is still relatively low, so we feel like we’ve got significant headroom to grow this year,” she says. “There’s still so many advertisers that haven’t tried Reddit yet in the UK. It’s our job to help educate and get them on board and help them see success.”
The platform has traditionally indexed highly on advertisers in service verticals such as finance, entertainment and sports betting. More recently, goods verticals — retail, tech and auto — have grown as user behaviour has developed, with more people “coming to Reddit to discuss commercial conversations and finding products and services to buy,” Walker explains.
As Reddit’s userbase has grown, consumer packages goods (CPG) brands have likewise been more likely to consider the platform for awareness campaigns. Tortilla chip brand Takis, for example, wanted to align with sports and gaming subcultures among UK Redditors, a strategy that Walker says exemplifies targeting strategies typical to the platform.
Scaling users and monetising search
In January, regulator Ofcom reported that Reddit overtook TikTok as Britain’s fourth most visited social media service. In the past two years, it has seen an 88% increase in the proportion of UK internet users it reaches, with three in five Brits now visiting the site.
What explains Reddit’s strong user growth? As Walker cites, in the UK market, the platform is “resonating with different audiences” than it used to. Namely, the number of women using the platform has overtaken men in the UK, with subreddits around parenting and health issues scaling substantially last year.
“I think where the internet is becoming more summarised and sanitised by AI, there’s actually a yearning for that human-to-human conversation, and that’s what Reddit solves for,” argues Walker (pictured, left). (Nevermind Reddit’s potential bot problem, especially in the age of AI.)
Reddit’s growth has also been substantially buoyed by Google, which Walker admits has been a key driver of user growth. Reddit, she notes, has been coming up at the top of search queries for a while now. This has led to a “self-fulfilling prophecy”: as users find Reddit useful, they begin adding the term onto their future Google searches.
But many a publisher is keenly aware that Google’s favour can be lost as quickly as it was gained. To hedge against reliance on Google, the platform has developed its own AI search tool, dubbed Reddit Answers. Walker tells The Media Leader the company is actively considering “how we can monetise that in the future”.
During the company’s Q4 earnings call, CEO Steve Huffman claimed the weekly number of active Reddit Answers users grew from 1m in Q1 2025 to 15m in Q4.
The AI search tool debuted in five new languages in Q4, and the platform is presently “piloting dynamic agentic search results that include media beyond text”. The eventual goal is to unite Reddit’s traditional search engine with its AI search engine.
The Max Campaigns opportunity
Walker joined Reddit as its head of mid market in the UK in 2023. She previously had spent nearly seven years at Snap in similar roles, and before that had worked in sales roles at MailOnline and Global.
Since joining, the mid market UK team has tripled in size to comprise nine people. As she describes it, the segment “continues to be the fastest-growing business for us.” While she declines to state precisely what range of adspend constitutes the “mid market”, she offers that her team looks after “advertisers who work with some of the biggest agencies to some of the smallest agencies to direct.”
Core to Reddit’s strategy in picking up lower-funnel advertisers, especially those in the long tail, is its new Max Campaigns feature, which launched in beta in early January.
Similar to Meta’s Advantage+ or Google’s Performance Max, Max Campaigns is a campaign tool that automates bids, creative and targeting. The company claims it delivers lower costs and improved results.
“It’s hugely important,” Walker says. “Whether you’re the largest business or the smallest, having efficiencies in how you run your ad campaigns, it’s always a good thing. Clients always want better performance for their money and Max Campaigns is really helping us deliver that.”
Notably, ads aren’t shown everywhere on Reddit, but rather against just a “small portion” of subreddits that the company’s commercial team is confident adhere to community guidelines and brand safety policies.
Subreddits labelled NSFW (Not Safe For Work; generally referring to pornography and other adult content) are ineligible for ad placements, as are subreddits that act as support groups, including addiction-related communities and places where users seek health information.
Reddit’s leadership explicitly views the platform as for adults. Walker claims that 90% of Reddit users are over the age of 18, though it’s not clear whether such an estimate is verifiable. The app is, however, classified as 17+ on app stores, so parental controls can block the app from appearing for young users.
The relative care toward what is monetised on Reddit is distinct from other endless scroll platforms that struggle to moderate content at scale. Whereas most social media platforms today default to algorithmic For You feeds, Reddit maintains a greater level of user choice by allowing users to subscribe to individual subreddits, with their posts then appearing on the homepage.
What’s displayed on a given subreddit at any one time is generally consistent for all users, making it thus more consistent for advertisers to understand the type of content they are most likely to be placed against.
‘Not a black box’
Apart from performance, what excites Walker most about Max Campaigns is the insights that it can help derive for clients.
“It’s not a black box on Reddit,” she explains. “We offer audience personas of those that have been interacting with your ads within the Max Campaign. So the machines might be finding you audiences that you didn’t actually think were going to resonate with your product, but really are. That insight will be able to be taken back and help with your media strategy going forward.”
Reddit has likewise been increasingly used by consumer researchers for the purpose of social listening via Reddit’s free-to-use Reddit Pro. Advertisers can input keywords, such as their brand name or the names of their competitors, and receive insights about how Reddit users perceive them across the platform.
“All of this insight is helping them show up well on Reddit, whether it’s in their paid or organic strategy,” Walker adds. “And a lot of brands are using that on their off-Reddit strategy as well.”
Brands are typically advised to conduct social listening to understand and “learn the language” of a given community before advertising to them. Despite much of Reddit’s stated distate for advertising, Walker insists most Reddit users don’t mind viewing paid ads. Organic efforts, meanwhile, are most effective if they help solve users’ problems or make them feel heard. Sonos, for example, has an employee that regularly checks r/Sonos to help consumers troubleshoot issues with their products.
“If he was going in and selling things, I don’t think that would be well received,” Walker reflects. “That’s what paid ads are for.”
Reddit’s focus on community and search continues to drive revenue