At one point yesterday, Reddit shares were up over 15% (before fading in later trading) as the social media platform posted its first set of results since going public in March. The TL;DR breakdown? Daily active users rose to 82.7 million, revenues were up 48% year-over-year, and the future apparently looks neon-orange bright, with adjusted profit in sight for Q2.
After perhaps the highest-profile IPO of 2024 so far, there were a lot of eyes on the company’s inaugural earnings report yesterday... not least because execs staged an ask-me-anything of sorts, fielding a couple of — admittedly stuffy and heavily-screened — questions from Redditors on the call. One revelation that surprised some less-initiated observers, however, was actually about the platform’s active users themselves.
Despite its origins (the site’s basically a huge hub of niche online forums where users can interact with people who share the same fixations), a lot of Reddit’s daily users might not be as invested as the platform’s format presupposes... or as Reddit execs would ideally like.
Indeed, just ~48% of its daily active users are logged in when using the platform, meaning that the majority of Reddit visitors are only able to view posts, rather than make or comment on them — perhaps a troubling data point for a platform that’s defined by user-generated content more than most other social media. It also means that less info can be collected about each logged out user (arguably good for the individual, bad for targeted advertising).
It’s interesting to note that logged out users were up 48% year-on-year, while the number of Redditors who were logged in grew 27%, with most of the former category coming from Google, according to CEO Steve Huffman, leading some analysts to ponder Reddit’s dependence on the search engine.
