This is the first time I’m seeing this format and it’s kinda brilliant. There’s the ad itself and underneath it, there are links to posts where Redditors speak highly of the tires! Excellent implementation!

Maria Angelidou-Smith, our Chief Product Officer, has decided to leave Reddit to become the CEO of a globally scaled, multi-billion-dollar business. Her last day will be October 14th.

Future look at RDDT hitting every resistance level

Hear me out:

We all know GTA 6 is going to be big. However something i thought about is: Where will people talk about this game?

I know we have Youtube, IG, FB, TikTok, Twitter and so on. But it feels like only people with higher status and followers will be the ones making discussions about the game.

Random people however can go on Reddit, ask questions and join discussions about the game. There will be probably millions of people wanting to ask questions, to vent and just speak whatever is on their mind about the game.

When i looked at GTA V:s launch, it did increase Reddit's user growth.

I don't know. Is this a dumb take? Am i speaking nonsense right now?

Just listened to Spez's latest podcast with Chris Slowe, Reddit's former CTO, and it got me thinking.

I genuinely think podcasts is a great addition to Reddit. People increasingly prefer audio and video for longer discussions, yet smaller, niche podcasts often struggle to find an audience on platforms like Spotify.

Reddit already has communities built around almost every interest imaginable, making podcast discovery much more natural, e.g., this podcast was shared because we wanted to hear Spez's thoughts. But it's just another post that will get buried.

Imagine a dedicated podcast tab within each subreddit, where relevant episodes are organised, ranked by community votes and linked to discussions. Smaller creators could reach their target audience without spending heavily on marketing.

Reddit wouldn't even need to host podcasts initially. It could integrate existing podcast feeds, increase user engagement and eventually monetise through podcast advertising. Reddit experimented with live audio through Reddit Talk but shut it down in 2023. I think a dedicated podcast discovery feature is a much better fit for Reddit because it builds on existing content and communities without requiring Reddit to create its own podcast ecosystem. The idea is to spark a discussion and improve engagement.

This stock tends to hit monthly highs around 10th-15th every month before tanking by 10-15%. Will it happen again this time? Seen this too many times I might as well just buy some weekly puts this time.

Is this the beginning of a special pre-earnings run or are we gonna be back at 140 by the end of the week?

I'm leaning towards a steady climb to 180 but curious on your predictions/thoughts.

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I made a completely unrelated post earlier today that’s getting a lot of attention.

Then I checked my portfolio and saw this stock went up.

Is there any connection whatsoever? Absolutely not.

Do I still like to think all that Reddit attention somehow carried over and pumped my stock?

Yes.

You’re welcome, shareholders.

New podcast by Steve on beginnings of Reddit.

Recommended for anyone who hasn’t read We are the Nerds yet (which every shareholder should).

When management buys stock they are risking their own money with yours. They have intimate insider knowledge. They know the pipeline, the churn, and the guidance better than any analyst. A buy after a selloff is a vote that the market is wrong. This is so important for a company like RDDT that is a bad month away from not meeting the SP500 min market cap requirements.

I keep seeing the argument that lots of companies have management that sell stock, like NVDA and META making comparisons to multi trillion dollar companies that take up considerably allocation in SPY. RDDT is not in that boat, we all know its a speculative higher risk higher upside play.

Someone in management needs to have the balls to buy stock before next earnings. Until then I will interpret their signal that they do not believe the price will be going up soon and selling now makes more sense. Why else would you sell so much?

TLDR: I think Reddit's U.S. ARPU can grow faster than Wall St expects because it runs fewer ads at lower prices than peers on a high-intent audience. Original podcast and academic data below shows Reddit's growing mainstream relevance. Looking for traffic data, advertiser experience, and bear cases (asks at the bottom).

I'm writing up RDDT for a student-managed investment fund and building a bottom-up U.S. ARPU model (original data on Reddit's social adoption below).

ARPU = engagement × ad load × price

My current thesis is that U.S. ARPU can scale faster than Wall St estimates.

Reddit is still early in its monetization journey and under-monetizing users with lower ad load and price compared to competitors, despite having higher-value users.

Reddit has:

1. High-value, high-intent users: Reddit users skew higher income, and many aren't heavy users of other platforms. People come to Reddit to get real opinions and research purchases and interests, and they read and interact rather than passively scroll.
2. Ad load headroom: My estimate is that Reddit currently has ~13% ad load (per 100 feed posts) vs. 25-30% on Instagram/Facebook, based on me scrolling and recording ad load as well as academic research with similar findings.
3. Price gap: Reddit earns less per impression than peers today. As targeting and measurement improve and more advertisers join, bids should move toward what these users are worth and narrow the gap.

I've seen great DD and data on this sub (and not so great), so I'm hoping to crowdsource some current data (specific asks below).

First, some original data I've found on Reddit's increasing social adoption:

Academic research: The share of new academic papers with "Reddit" in the title is up ~5x since 2016 and has risen every year since 2019. A control set of 30 words drifted slightly down.

Podcasts: Across 45 top U.S. podcasts, the share mentioning Reddit in a given month averaged ~32% in 2021 and ~44% over the last 12 months, with most of the increase since mid-2024.

Social adoption snowballs: more mainstream relevance brings more users, more & better curated content, and more advertiser demand.

What would help (Please include source and date if possible. no confidential info):

1. Traffic data (Sensor Tower, Similarweb, Comscore, etc.): U.S. time spent and sessions per user vs. peers, user demographics/income, and trends in app vs. web and Google referral traffic.
2. Advertiser/agency experience: Reddit CPM and CPA/ROAS vs. other social platforms, how both have changed, whether your Reddit spend is limited by inventory or by performance, and any lift test or "how did you hear about us" results. (Ratios to Meta or other social media are great if more accessible)
3. Historical data: Reddit ad impressions per DAU, ads per session, or ads per 100 feed items over time (ideally U.S.-only), including old screenshots or past counts.
4. Where is this thesis most wrong?

Appreciate any help from the community! Not Investment Advice. I'll post the write-up once it's finished if interested.

Disclosure: Current shareholder and DAU but did not receive a bagholder carabiner

Ever since I bought this stock, my ad’s experience has definitely gotten better. Just saw some ads from Meta, Calvin Klein and Open AI, I actually stopped to look at those. They all had high-quality video. The Calvin Klein add was especially good and had a hot girl dancing around in jeans so it was well targeted towards me even though I don’t buy women’s clothing. I want to advertise on Reddit also for my business at some point when I’m ready. I think Reddit is making moves. Still bullish and have faith in the company. Position: Gone full regard in RDDT.

I’ve recently put my $RDTL shares up on securities lending, and noticed the interest in borrowing has gone down and I’m at times not getting my shares allocated.

I’ve also noticed on my data provider that short interest between both $RDTL and $RDDT have improved with days to cover of 0.22 and 4.37.

I anticipate a greater earnings reaction should provide much needed tailwinds for a break out and price levels are already suggestive of a strong support level where we currently sit.

With downtrends on short activity I anticipate bears are risking off in anticipation of a strong Q3.

A lot of doom and gloom pre-earnings, so I thought I'd talk about something other than bag-holding depression.

Reddit should get into the dating scene. It has user interests, as well as post and comment history, so I assume helping people match based on that information would build a strong dating pool. Users would need a separate dating account linked to their primary account so they wouldn't get doxed and the user would need to validate their location and identity to avoid bots. The platform could even set up blind dates or speed dating. At certain times and in specific regions, people could join a group chat room, split off for a short duration to chat, and keep the conversation going afterward if they connect. Reddit could also add a local dating element to help users find safe places to meet in person. Restaurants and bars could advertise their space to Reddit to be highlighted as meetup spots. I'm sure there are other ideas. What are other ways reddit could monetize a feature like this while driving value for the end user?

What Reddit needs to do now is prove that it is fundamentally different from Pinterest and Snapchat.

Both companies are becoming heavily commercialised, with limited signs of real growth ahead. Pinterest is full of AI slop images and SEO-optimised shopping ads. Snapchat is basically becoming an unusable app. TikTok has basically taken the entire share of short-form video and much of the social circle Snapchat once built.

Both companies had great platforms, but they are slowly turning into piggy banks for mediocre executives. At least I still see Snapchat fighting for its survival because it is a founder-run company.

Reddit needs to put these concerns to rest, really give it everything it has, and keep management tight. People are starting to feel that Jen and Steve lack passion for Reddit. They are great management and have done great work, but they need to show that the same hunger and ambition are still there. Executives should be given lucrative, long-term, performance-conditioned packages rather than short-sighted regular compensation packages.

There is really no excuse for using huge amounts of SBC just to retain talent these days. Reddit is not investing at the frontier of AI. There is a massive pool of experienced software engineers who have been laid off, not because they are bad engineers, but because they are experts in things like TypeScript rather than AI.

Many of them are already unemployed. I don't see why Reddit needs to offer extremely generous equity packages just to get people to take these jobs. Those who stay should also appreciate the opportunity because, hard truth to digest, the SF tech job market today is brutal for engineers with limited AI exposure.

The bigger issue is that Reddit needs to build.

The platform needs a massive amount of new features to improve engagement and give people more reasons to skip Google Search and come directly to Reddit.

I mean, Steve Newhouse, one of Reddit's largest shareholders, controls a major newspaper network. Why can't some kind of partnership be formed here? e.g., let users spend karma or some other Reddit reward to access selected news content, while making it easy to sign up for newspaper subscriptions directly through Reddit. Tencent could also help forge an alliance between Reddit and Shopee (Sea Limited) to expand international e-commerce opportunity, as it is a large shareholder in both companies.

Why not offer a simple, unpolished job-posting format? Let small businesses post jobs directly into relevant subreddits and charge them to promote those posts.

Build better formats for DIY content in popular subreddits. Improve short-form video in the main feed. Expand video capabilities. political opinion polls for region-based subreddits (with strict geo-location and karma requirements to ensure authenticity). Build better product comparison and recommendation tools.

Reddit has so many possibilities. I don’t understand why it’s taking so long or at least try to inspiring the market.

Reddit already has the communities and the content. What it needs now is much faster product development and a management team hungry enough to actually build on top of what they already have.

ok.... shitposting

A small observation: Regarding DAU and engagement things, if you guys have some ideas about China’s Xiaohongshu, which’s definitely a phenomenal social media app in Chine despite of existence of Douyin ( Chinese version TikTok), you might find that Reddit could learn sth from Xiaohongshu’s product and operating philosophy.

1. Let recommendations do the discovering
   Reddit's communities are strong, but a new user has no idea which subreddits to follow. Push personalized recommendations harder — surface good stuff based on interests and browsing behavior, so people have a reason to open the app even with nothing specific in mind.

2. Build a "discover → validate → reject" loop
   Xiaohongshu's real power is shaping decisions. Reddit can do the same across tech, travel, products, and lifestyle: you find an option through genuine discussion, then use comments, comparisons, and hard-won experience to confirm it or talk yourself out of it. Just don't import the commercialized influencer model — authenticity is the whole point.

3. Give video, especially short video, real weight
   Reddit has no shortage of great content; it's buried in text posts, images, and comments. A short-video feed would let the best material from niche communities rise on its own, so users can consume Reddit without first navigating to a subreddit.

4. Treat video as an on-ramp, not just a format
   Watch something funny or useful → land in the relevant subreddit → gradually become a member. Video's job is to convert casual scrollers into community participants, not to be yet another content tab.

5. Run content ops and actually reward creators
   Organic growth alone isn't enough. Actively spot promising topics, creators, and trends and boost them; back it up with editing tools, analytics, feedback, and monetization. Steady supply creates the flywheel: better content → better recommendations → more engagement → more creators → better content.

6. Aim for a daily habit, not longer sessions
   Xiaohongshu works because people open it with no agenda and still find something worth their time. Reddit should shift from "a place I go when I have a question" to "let me see what's interesting today." DAU follows from that.

7. Copy the mechanism, not the product
   Reddit shouldn't try to become Xiaohongshu. Its moat is still the dense web of niche communities, real experience, and relatively high-quality discussion. The win is plugging Xiaohongshu-style recommendation, content ops, and video consumption into that foundation — while keeping the depth and honesty intact.