Clocking up more than 1.6 billion monthly visits from 430 million monthly active users across more than 100,000 communities, Reddit offers a significant audience development opportunity for publishers. And a recent article in What’s New In Publishing says that the industry is starting to pay attention.
Reinventing Reddit
- Reddit, launched in 2005, has become the focus for online discussion with an average of 55 million daily active users. Best known for niche communities of interest formed around user generated content, the platform has spent the last couple of years ‘cleaning up its act’.
- Efforts to fight bots, trolls, and fake accounts are ongoing. Content that is in violation of new policies is filtered out; moderators take down content that goes against community guidelines. Reddit’s famous upvoting and downvoting system is also being used to surface the most valuable content for users.
- The rehabilitation effort looks to be paying off, with the platform booking $439 million in online advertising in 2021. The revenue growth came after Reddit abandoned programmatic advertising for native ads sold through its direct sales channels or on its Ads Platform.
Publishing opportunity
Reddit is also working to make it easier for publishers to benefit from their involvement with the platform.
- It recently released an embed feature that allows publishers to bring Reddit comments into their stories the way they commonly do with Tweets. The new embed facility provides publishers with a straightforward and legally compliant way to republish content from Reddit communities.
- Writing on the website of social media tracking firm NewsWhip, Mark Brown said that the power of Reddit quotes can’t be overstated when it comes to publishers gaining insight into community attitudes. He said:
The embed feature adds a new dynamic and depth to stories that a reporter could ever hope to source working the phones or on-location.
- By embedding comments from Reddit communities, publications also have the opportunity to engage with the communities that have helped them develop stories. Audience development wins can also follow as community members join conversations inspired by stories that began with their group.
Tracking trends
Ashley Dye, Audience Director at The Marshall Project, says that Reddit is one of their first ports of call when trying to judge if a story is addressing reader needs. They said:
When we publish a story, I try to sit back and think: What is this story answering? And are people asking that question in some subreddits? And I move from there to find the right subreddits to go into.
A new content partnership between Reddit and Newswhip will help publishers to predict topics trending in Reddit communities before they make it to the mainstream.
Anyone can see what is currently trending on Reddit, but NewsWhip will use a real-time API feed to analyze data and predict future trends. The service will deliver notifications to journalists about trending issues related to their content focus.
Gabriel Sands, Reddit’s News and Sports Partnerships Lead, said Reddit has invested in the partnership because it helps facilitate content discovery in a way that was previously possible at scale. He said:
The NewsWhip integration can, by and large, be a silver bullet for content discovery.
