Reddit traffic is growing. Google can thank that.

Photo illustration: Intelligencer

Reddit’s first year as a public company is going well. The company, which is almost 20 years old, shared extremely strong This week’s earnings report: Revenue up 68% year over year, daily active unique visitors up 47%, Reddit turning a profit for the first time in its history. Earnings beat analysts’ expectations and the share price rose more than 40%.

There was no shortage of other good numbers to share on Reddit. Advertising revenue increased 56% year-over-year to $315 million, while “other” revenue, mostly from AI licensing deals, rose 547% to $33 million. That’s a relatively small number, but it’s significant. contributes significantly to the profitability of the company. Revenue per user has also increased slightly, meaning visits are being monetized more effectively on average. After years of slow growth and a persistent failure to make money despite its size and influence, Reddit is rapidly gaining momentum.

Reddit’s growth and trajectory are undeniable. In his press release and letter to investorsHowever, they are also somewhat underexplained. Why can a mature, popular, largely unchanged platform suddenly begin to grow like a viral startup? (Reddit’s latest quarterly report included similarly staggering growth numbers.) The company suggests a number of factors—machine translation to localize content for new markets, improved publishing interfaces and tools for users—but ultimately talks about the obvious answer: Google, the most popular website in the world. and the largest traffic referrer on the internet today is sending more people to Reddit. Much more.

The backstory here is a little fuzzy and contradictory, but the basic outline is this: Late last year, Google began prioritizing certain sources of user-generated content in search in an effort to uncover more information.first person view” in response to questions. This, among other less clearly explained changes, appears to have led to greater visibility on forums like Quora and especially Reddit, which some users were already adding to queries as a sort of hack to improve search results (“best iPhone battery Reddit” ). ,” For example).

This also matched massive fall in traffic for a number of online publishers, some of which are spam and others less so. This caught the attention of Google analysts and search engine optimization (SEO) experts and caused a wave of panic in online media, which relies heavily on Google to find readers. “Reddit’s growth is unprecedented,” says Lily RayVice President of marketing consulting company Amsive. “We’ve never seen anything like this in the SEO space.” According to Ray, between July and August 2023, Reddit “really started to take off” in terms of visibility in popular search terms. Now, for many information queries (a term that refers to queries that require a user to answer a specific question), “you’ll see Reddit.com ranking at the top.” (There is widespread agreement among web publishers and SEO experts that this change connected Google’s artificial intelligence licensing agreement with Reddit, which became public earlier this year; companies deny that the two are related.)

The source of Reddit’s growth is also clear from its official metrics, although it doesn’t specifically focus on Google or search traffic. For example: the number of daily active unique visitors logged in increased by 27% worldwide, while the number of registeredoutside The number of daily active unique visitors increased by 70%. In the third quarter of last year, registered users accounted for a slight majority of daily unique visits to Reddit; this year the leadership was taken by visitors who did not log out of the system. This corresponds to growth driven by people clicking Reddit links on Google, rather than organic growth from people searching specifically for Reddit. Some of them simply return to the site they are already using. Many of them appear on Reddit, as on any other website, as another link in Google results.

In his letter to investors, CEO Steve Huffman mentions how important Reddit has become to Google—”Reddit was the sixth most searched word on Google in the US,” he notes—but is somewhat more cagey about how important Google has become to Reddit. This is as close as it gets:

Looking to the future, improving the search experience on Reddit is a key part of our strategy. We want to provide the best experience for all users. This includes users navigating to Reddit from external search and those searching directly on Reddit are looking for recommendations on what to buy, what to watch, or what products or services are the best. We know that many users are looking for more than just answers; they’re looking for authentic, real-world ideas and advice from Reddit communities. We’re committed to making navigating conversations and content on Reddit easier and more intuitive.

Again, Reddit is doing well, and the arrival of a large number of new visitors, some of whom will become active users and contributors to the platform, making it more useful and valuable, is good news in many ways. But getting the majority of your traffic—your main source of income as an ad-supported business—from a much larger partner comes with risks. Just ask those websites that have just seen their previous visitors being redirected to Reddit. en masse. Or American media is collapsing!

Reddit has developed a reputation for itself as a community of communities, a site where people intentionally spend time and occasionally contribute through posts, conversations, or voluntary moderation. Its users are motivated by the presence of other users; Accordingly, for better or worse, the company has had to at least somewhat respond to the demands of Reddit users, on whom it depends both for advertising revenue and as a source of free content and labor. (However, in the run-up to the IPO, Reddit I’ve run out of patience for this dynamic and has reasserted its credibility among the restless mod community.) If Reddit starts to function more like de facto Google extension – being a website filled with content that is easy to find, rather than a self-contained community – it will have to face various challenges.

Already, spammers In an attempt to take advantage of Reddit’s visibility on Google, they flood the site with false information, often generated by artificial intelligence.”parasitic SEOcontent, creating new work for already struggling volunteer moderators. In 2007, Demand Media, a company that existed to get Google traffic, went the route mutually beneficial agreement with a search engine score that briefly exceeded The New York’s score Time. Demand Media was a rather cynical content farm that paid freelancers small fees to produce huge amounts of passable search content that briefly filled in the gaps in Google’s search results pages. Reddit, which is very different in terms of history, its role in the wider network and its relationship with users, nevertheless serves a similar function and receives similar benefits. It’s not a bad deal! But this is potentially risky, especially now that Reddit refusal to index from other search engines associated with artificial intelligence firms, which is almost all of them.

In other words, Reddit’s new success is at the mercy of Google, and it’s a fact both companies are keenly aware of: if the search giant decides to start showing fewer Reddit links – or perhaps starts summarizing them more using AI – it will pay for access to everyone on After all, this data—the company’s explosive growth could be stalled or reversed, which becomes an even bigger problem now that it has a ticker symbol.

Reddit’s current challenge is to try to convert its new traffic into users who will stick around, communicate with each other, and continue to create enough truly trustworthy, interesting or useful content to retain other users, and so that Google can collect and advertise his. against. For years, Reddit has had to answer to its investors. And its users, whose desires did not always coincide. Now he has to answer to the most powerful website on the Internet.