Reddit Profitable in The Black First Time Ever

When I started the Channalyst it was with the desire to go deep on a channel every few quarters with the goal to alert Marketers to channels they need to pay attention to ...particularly one's they may have overlooked. Reddit was for me a channel that was not properly understood and for marketers in the overly saturated universe we live in - that is gold. So I chose Reddit.

So 3 quarters in --$RDDT which went public recently is crushing it! The Q3 earnings are fire having hit profitability for the first time ever. With a revenue increase YoY of 68% representing a profit of $29 Million. They grew their user base by 47% to 97.2 Million daily users - for a 20 year old company I'd say that in Adizes Corporate Company lifecycle chart they are late arrivals to PRIME. And my hypothesis around the importance of founders as I spoke about in my TED talk still holds.

But having said that their growth can be attributed to something so obvious as CEO Steve Huffman indicated in his CEO letter - Language translation. Making the site available in other languages - duh! AI powered translation has opened up Reddit to the French and they are eating it up and so are the Portuguese, Italian, Spanish and German speaking people. They plan to expand to 30 countries in 2025.

So you can expect this to translate to beaucoup dinero in Advertising revenue. Ad revenue was $315 million in Q3 which is a healthy growth and bodes well given the new markets.

CEO Steve Huffman had this to say about Reddit's growth "Reddit’s influence continues to grow across the broader internet,” Huffman wrote. “In 2024 so far, ‘Reddit’ was the sixth most Googled word in the U.S., underscoring that when people are looking for answers, advice, or community, they’re turning to Reddit.” The platform is also working to make its search feature “easier and more intuitive.”

But not everyone is happy about the changes at Reddit which have been numerous including

inking advertising deals with professional sports leagues, upgrading its “ask me anything” posts, and cracking down on web crawlers attempting to scrape its content. Huffman has even weighed the idea of letting users create paid subreddits and even moved to prevent sitewide protests. source - The Verge

One of The Verge readers had this to say about the success at Reddit...not a happy camper

What do you guys think should Reddit be congratulated on these latest earnings? I happen to be a fan. It's one of the last places where you can have conversations with randoms for hours on end about topics you have interests in and learn and commiserate and celebrate and argue an take it to the DM's if you want to connect IRL.