Reddit’s reach is growing. In a letter to shareholders in Q4 2025 the platform announced that it was averaging 121.4 million unique daily active users — a year-on-year increase of almost 20%. The number of unique weekly active users was up even more, rising 24% to 471.6 million.
But the influence of the self-proclaimed ‘front page of the internet’ in the age of conversational AI is growing even faster than its reach, with various sources claiming that between 40% and 50% of AI data is now sourced from Reddit.
And with greater influence and reach, comes more interest from brands. In 2025, Reddit’s ad revenue rose 74% year-over-year to $2.1bn.
Matt Gerrard is Reddit’s head of international creative strategy having moved over from Pinterest in 2022. He talks to MediaCat about how Reddit is adapting to its new place in the media ecosystem, and how brands can win over its notoriously fickle users.
How has Reddit changed as a platform as a result of gen AI?
Gen AI is a really fascinating space at the moment, but when it comes to Reddit, it has and always will be about the authentic human conversation. We’ve been hosting that for the past 20 years, and our strategy hasn’t really shifted at all.
Conversation happens within existing subreddits, and we try to make it easier for our users and our advertisers to navigate all that rich conversation to great insight and better answers. When users come to Reddit, we need to help them find the communities that they would personally be interested in. When brands come to Reddit, we need to do the same thing, but we also need to equip them with the right insights. We built tools like Reddit Pro and Reddit Community Intelligence to allow advertisers to sift through all of this conversational data to isolate specific insights that they can build entire campaigns from.
We’re using AI to navigate the authentic conversation that happens on the platform, as opposed to generating content that isn’t human.
Reddit has become one of the main sources of information for AI agents. Have you noticed more brands trying to use that status to their advantage?
We get asked this question a lot. What we do know is that Reddit is a resource across all major AI platforms. Nobody knows exactly what will surface in an LLM response, but brands that show up helpfully and honestly in Reddit communities are building the kind of presence that these models value.
The playbook here for brands, what we talk to them all the time about, is to be in the right conversations, be as helpful as possible and be human. That’s ultimately what we try to do. We want brands to be additive over time, and that is ultimately what will build your brand on Reddit.
Do you feel like that’s something that brands have been adept at navigating?
They’re definitely still trying to figure it out, but we’re seeing a lot of great progress from brands on Reddit. The typical starting point would be to appear through page ads to ensure that your brand is being aligned to the right communities and conversations. You build that level of familiarity with your target audience and then, over time, you’ll get a good sense as to when is the right moment to organically contribute to that conversation.
Ultimately, we’re trying to help brands meaningfully contribute to the communities and the conversations they show up within, as opposed to contributing to mindless consumption. We want brands to be fun, to be additive and to address the needs and wants of the communities that they share.
Has Reddit’s user base and demographics changed over the past couple of years?
It has in the UK. The UK is Reddit’s second largest market by views, and it’s the fourth most-visited social platform in Britain. Reach is growing significantly across Gen Z and women, thanks to communities covering beauty, parenting, sport and fandom. Internationally, Reddit’s user base reached around 121.4 million daily active users last quarter, which is significant.
We’re also going into other, multi-language markets through machine learning translation, which now covers 30 languages. Reddit Answers, our in-app AI tool, has now launched in French, German, Spanish, Italian and Brazilian Portuguese. We’re enabling more global markets to have access to all the good content that gets spoken about on Reddit.
It’s quite illuminating for brands to understand that there is a community for every single thing you could possibly imagine. We have incredible communities that foster this amazing open conversation. For brands, once they realise that there is a community for them to connect with authentically on Reddit, they see great results.
When social media platforms reach a certain size, they tend to attract professional/full-time creators that push out the casual users. Is Reddit actively guarding against this?
It’s not an active thing that we’re seeking to avoid. It’s just that we want to serve everyone and the global conversation. On Reddit, communities are the core influencers. Everyone on Reddit has an equally-weighted contribution towards whatever conversation is going on. We understand users to kind of age into Reddit: you’ll spend more time on Reddit in your second year than you did your first, and so on and so forth. We don’t prioritise any particular type of user.
We want to really open the conversation at a global scale, because that’s what Reddit is, it’s the world in conversation. Reddit is very different to other social platforms. We talk about it internally as it being that human algorithm. Every post and every comment on Reddit is democratically upvoted and downloaded by the community. Whatever you contribute has to gain the kind of approval of other users, and every post starts on zero.
What brands are currently successful on Reddit?
I’ve got to highlight Sega, specifically in the UK to support the global launch of Football Manager 26. Sega ran a full funnel, multi-format campaign targeted existing and lapsed players via subreddit, keyword and interest marketing. The activity included sports category takeovers timed around the launch to reach engaged football fans and promoted posts that ran throughout the campaign to inform and convert. It also led into other formats, like our freeform ads, which is longer-form editorial.
We know that Redditors really want to understand the kind of details behind each release, whether it’s a new product or a new service that you’re launching. Through freeform ads, you give brands the opportunity to build out a more editorial-led ad where folks will read all the great things you have to say about your service. It’s a good opportunity to build in tone of voice and exercise a bit of creativity.
The campaign has delivered CTR above the global gaming category benchmark for Sega, with Redditors spending an average of 79 seconds with the post — around 174% above our gaming benchmarks. That’s folks spending just over a minute and twenty seconds with an editorial piece of content.
What campaigns do you think have made great use of Reddit as a platform?
The Skoda Octavia case study is a really, really good one. It utilised what we call a locked comment poll. They had a promoted post, and they provided every customisable element of the Skoda Octavia as locked comments within the post where fans could then upvote and download what element that they would want to be seen within the Redditor version of the car.
I thought that was a really unique way to use some of our Reddit specific elements like the upvote and downvote, and lead into co-creation with a community. Brands have a great opportunity on Reddit to not only build great creative campaigns that are informed by the conversation, but also in participation with communities as well.
What should other brands learn from these campaigns?
I think for Sega, the thing to take away from that is that they haven’t just used one ad format within the suite that we have available. We understand that brands see elevated performance when they execute across a number of our different formats: whether that’s promoted posts with static imagery, promoted video, free formats or takeovers. This creates a whole experience for the user and ensures you show up in very different ways.
On the Skoda side, utilising Reddit’s unique elements in the campaign, even if it’s just mentions of a community or nods to the fact that they are on Reddit, that goes a long way. Reddit has a very interesting language and culture that we really encourage brands to listen to, to learn from, and implement tastefully.
Can you tell me a little about the new ad formats Reddit has been adding in recent months?
We’re trying to ensure that businesses of any size can achieve success on the Reddit and connect with audiences in meaningful ways.
The most timely news is the DPA enhancements announced at Shoptalk: especially collection ads, which is a mixture of lifestyle and shoppable product tiles in one carousel. It’s already delivering 8% ROAS for early adopters. There’s also Reddit-unique overlays. This essentially will run ads that have unique little Reddit overlays at the top of the image that will say Reddit pick or top pick.
We’re leaning into a lot of different formats that help our users shop directly on Reddit ads and take action with intent there.
What campaigns have used these new formats?
Those are all very new, but we have other new formats as well, including interactive ads that launched in Q4. These are highly custom, dynamic ads that exist within the feed.
For instance, for Electronic Arts’ campaign for Battlefield 6, we created a custom API integration where we showcased in-game data live within the RSAT battlefield community.
We also have Reddit Max campaigns. This allows advertisers to automate their targeting, automate their creative selection and budget allocation while opening up insight into audiences your ads are resonating with. It’s really an all-in-one service level.
What would you like to see brands doing with these formats in the future?
When any brand is going into Reddit, the core is to listen and really understand what your community is talking about, and use Reddit Answers to ask the hard questions and figure out how your brand is showing up in conversation: what are the opportunity areas, what are the attitudes and behaviours of your core target audience. I think that’s a great way to navigate Reddit and to highlight some of those really interesting and fertile conversations that can lead to greater creative thinking.
When it comes to new formats, I would say, use the format that works for you, depending on your objective. We have a lot of different formats that are specific to each one of the objectives throughout the funnel.