Reddit's Growth Surge

What Marketers need to Know

The Marketer’s Dilemma: To Reddit or not to Reddit?

If you’re a marketer in an enterprise organization we have been taught to carve out a % of our marketing budget for “experimentation” which is sometimes testing a new channel or tactic within an existing channel. Those marketers for small businesses are always on the hunt for a channel that is going to be cost efficient because you have a limited budget.

But how do you decide what channel to spend your experimentation or limited budget on? Most of us go through a thought process that looks something like this:

• Can I find my ideal customer on Reddit?
• Are they easily identifiable and targetable?
• Can I reach them organically or do I have to pay to reach them?
• How saturated and competitive is the channel?
• Can I reach them more affordably than I can in my other channels?
• What resources will I need to effectively use this channel?
• How steep is the learning curve to adopt this channel effectively?

This post is not designed to answer all these questions for you but definitely pique your consideration.

TLDR;

Reddit is experiencing fast growth and has both organic and paid media offerings that make it a good candidate for brand and lead generation experimentation. Particularly interesting is the fact that it has an unduplicated audience from the other social media channels and because it’s a channel that is largely overlooked because of the hype around the tiktokification of social media, the advertising is comparably affordable. Finding a community relevant to your product or service is also arguably much easier than other social media networks. However not all brands are able to decode the “how” to market on Reddit.

Reddit by the Numbers:

In their own words:

$82 Million daily active users and remarkably a large unduplicated audience not many social media networks can say that. What makes Reddit so unique?

From their most recent earnings report the site is experiencing double digit growth YoY.

• Daily Active Uniques (DAUq) averaged 82.7million in Q1 2024, a 37% year over year increase
• US DAUq grew 45% and International DAUq grew 30% year over year
• Logged-in users grew 27% year over year and logged out users grew 48% year over year.

While the pure number of monthly active users is still dwarfed by the other social networks the growth rate is impressive and the Unduplicated Audience should pique your interest.

Medium Income of the users on Reddit is high indicating BDM’s?

The fact that the median income on Reddit is $105k vs. the $75k that is typical of other social media platforms makes it interesting for those brands with high-ticket items or looking to target decision makers.

Ad Revenue Growth

39% Ad Revenue growth year of year…hmmm what is attracting those advertisers? Reddit does have some interesting Ad types that allow for awareness and engagement in ways that you simply cannot on other social media platforms. For Example AMA’s, Takeover and Freeform Ads which allow for longer attention grabbing as an advertiser and more range with your storytelling makes for an interesting testing ground.

The Takeover

I’ll be honest the “Takeover” feels hella nostalgic if like me you were around during the portal years the notion of a channel takeover has been around for a long time and is super cool for launches and events and worthy of consideration. It is one of the closest things to a “super bowl ad” online

AMA’s vs. “Lives”

AMA’s - Ask Me Anything events on Reddit are super unique because of the nature of them… they are text based which makes them perfect for SEO and the fact that the content lives on forever makes it perfect for marketers who don't want to “do marketing”. The other thing that makes them unique is the democratic nature of them in that anyone can ask a question vs. what you have with lives where it is up to the brand or creator who get called on to “go live” with the brand.? What I love is that the AMA content lives on evergreen for new prospects and fans to discover years later.

Conversation Placement

Another placement type that feels nostalgic but is intriguing is being able to run ads within a conversation thread. Remember when contextual ads were all the rage? How about putting your new skincare line in the middle of a conversation about skin care rituals?

Freeform Ads

Imagine an ad format that allows you to use 40,000 characters! Bring on the product how to’s, launch storytelling… makes it a very Reddit-unique ad type

Changing Search behavior

So when I asked my 20 year olds if they used Reddit … both said yes and one quipped “and I love it” okay that got my attention because we all know that while most of us use social media not many of us “love” it. So I probed further and asked what they did with it. My 26 year old daughter said Reddit is her search engine. Hmm tell me more … basically she indicated that Reddit is where she goes for product recommendations and when I asked why she wouldn't just look at online reviews … She indicated that what she gets from Reddit is different and more trustworthy than say Amazon online reviews. For marketers who are targeting Gen Z and GenY anything that disrupts search should be paid attention to.

So what do you think reader? Is there enough there to get you to experiment? Are you looking to test a new channel in the next 2 quarters? Do it… subscribe to the Channalyst newsletter as we explore Reddit for the next 2 quarters.

There is so much to unpack on what is going on that we are designing a deep-dive course to help enterprise and startup marketers fully understand how to do “Marketing and Advertising on Reddit” including audience intelligence. Help us design the course by telling us what you would be interested in learning about Reddit marketing. Fill out the 5 question Survey it takes 5 minutes.