Is that better? Can you guys hear me now? Yay! Okay, I'm Laura Martin. I'm the Senior Media and Internet Analyst at Needham & Company, and I'm gonna welcome to my stage Jen Wong, who's the Chief Operating Officer of Reddit, and we're gonna do a double session. So we're gonna be here till about ten today. I think, Jen, since we have the luxury of time, why don't you start by sharing a little bit of your professional path? You and I have crossed paths a couple times over our careers, so why don't you bring the audience, level set and bring the audience-
Sure
... up to date about how you got to Reddit as the Chief Operating Officer.
Yeah, thanks for having me. Well, let's see. I think where our paths have crossed because I've often worked in the world of consumer media and tech for the last 15 years. Two stints at public companies that were disrupted and trying to turn themselves around. That was AOL and Time Inc. One stint at a Sequoia-backed privately held company, which was PopSugar and ShopStyle, so a shopping search engine plus a publisher, and then here at Reddit. Then, prior to that, totally different life in consulting. I enjoyed it, but it was not a long-term career for me, let's say.
Yeah, in companies. You've been doing companies. Okay.
I like to build, yeah.
The personal question I'm asking every CEO on my stage over these two days is: What is the most impactful professional conversation you've ever had, and how did it change your path?
Ever had is a high bar, but I'll share one. One of the board members from Time Inc., who was a long-term mentor, said to me... This is when I was at PopSugar. He said: "Jen, people who know you really love you. They love the work that you do, but not enough people know you. Like, you haven't worked on a big enough canvas, in a big enough spotlight with in a large public company." And it was really, and look, he was trying to get me to join Time Inc., and he was successful in doing that. But it was very profound in that I just love working for smaller businesses. That was the mindset I was in. And he said, "Look, great," you know, Steve was talking about this, too.
Like, a lot of great companies, they're built in the public markets. That's just a different level of transparency and operation and rigor that you lead in, and I really encourage you to think about that opportunity." And look, it's been very popular to work at private companies that grow to very large sizes before becoming public. But that had a really profound impact on me in thinking about public/private and size of asset to work on, and I did end up joining Time Inc. And it is, it has increased, I think... When I look at where I want to work, I think about assets that have great raw materials that can be really big, and that's what got me really excited about Reddit. When Steve and I met six years ago, Reddit was smaller than it was today.
It was about 200 and change in terms of employees. It was still in a little bit of fix-it mode. There was still some reset to do in terms of the employee base, didn't have a business model yet, and was resetting its content moderation policies. So really still the early foundational moments and doing a little bit of cleanup, but I could see the potential of it, and even then, we discussed the potential of being a public company, because Reddit had that potential, and that was, that was so exciting, and that kind of fit this advice that I got about thinking, more expansively about a bigger canvas.
Yeah, that was a very impactful conversation for you, but also, you took the advice, too.
Yeah.
I mean, you didn't have to take the advice. You could have made just as much money in a private setting. Feels like all three of the public companies you've worked at have really strong cultures. Time Inc. and AOL both had really strong, and for sure, Reddit has a, I'm gonna call it just a cult culture.
Yeah.
That's what I call Disney-
Yeah
... and Apple.
Yeah.
Is that, is that something that attracts you, or is it just a coincidence that you ended up at these really strong, different cultures?
Yeah, I find that sometimes the culture of the company is also shaped by the product, and the some of it's driven by the passion for the product, right? So in digital media companies, especially like Time Inc., there's so much passion for the actual, the words, the product, the content, and people are so passionate about everything that they're writing and putting out. And the same at Reddit. The employees are so excited about the mission of our platform. Every day, they know that we're helping people get the information they need. We are working with a very, very diverse population of users, and that net-net, Reddit being in the world is just better for the world.
So, and often what happens is, I think, if the employees have that passion, you get a very strong, like, mission-driven culture, and Reddit's like that, right? Our mission is community, belonging, and empowerment for everyone in the world, and I often say that if you're more mercenary, and, you know, Reddit's had a great run in terms of its growth, you're just not gonna have a great experience here because we are so mission driven, and we make decisions around our mission that might be trade-offs that other folks wouldn't make.
And so you think it's from the product, not from the leader? I would have thought culture comes from the leader, and, like, Tim was a strong leader-
Yeah
... or Time Inc. definitely had strong leadership, and Steve is definitely a strong leader at Reddit.
Absolutely. I think leadership makes a difference in that we are the guardians of that mission, and the principles of the company, I think, radiate out from being mission driven. As a leadership team, we have to echo that, and we have to role model that so that it goes—it permeates throughout the company. But I like to think that companies should endure. Reddit should endure past any leader. We want that. We think Reddit, been around for 19 years, I mean, Steve will be around for a long time, but the point is, I think Reddit can have an even longer life, and we want that culture to endure even beyond that.
... And that's where the product comes in, 'cause as long as-
Yeah
The product stays the same, it should keep feeding the culture.
Exactly.
Yeah. Interesting. Okay, so let's turn to Reddit. At any time, if you guys want to put up your hand and ask Jen something, go ahead. I'll fast pass your question to the front of the line. But let's start, let's drill down. So we have three growth drivers at Reddit. Let's start with advertising, which is sort of the core business today and, and the economic driver today. Can you talk about what's driving user growth, ARPU, your plans, and your plans for ad load? Let's start with that.
Okay. That's a lot.
Yep.
Okay.
It is.
So first of all, I'll get to ARPU in a second, but ARPU is an output metric. There's no manager of ARPU in the company who's in their title. ARPU is the math between the revenue growth and the user growth, which are two things that we are very focused on. On the user growth side, you saw in Q1, our user growth was 37% year over year, 27% for logged-in users, which are the bedrock of inventory. You know, Reddit's kind of interesting because we have logged-in and logged-out users, and that most of that was from fundamental product work, making the product better, making Reddit faster, making it more performant, making the ML and the recommendations better. That is work that compounds on each other. It makes Reddit better and better and improves fundamental user retention.
It allows people to find their home on Reddit, find the communities that they love faster, and it improves how much time and how many communities they sign up for. That is really fundamental work that we keep. Now, in the logged-out users, some of those users, they come from search, and there are algorithm changes, but those come and go, so we don't pay too much attention to them. They're in there, but what we focus on is those fundamental product changes, and there's more there. I mean, we're just at the beginning of that journey. We see a clear roadmap of more improvements, more fundamental improvements that will, I think, support even more users finding their home on Reddit. So that's the user growth side. We feel really good about user growth. The second is on the revenue growth side.
So revenue grew 48% year-over-year. Ads grew 39% year-over-year. Ads has grown about 10 to 15 percentage points above the market pretty consistently over time. We're a share gainer. And, you know, while small, I think we just have a lot of potential. And on the advertising side, we more than doubled our click volume year-over-year. Part of that was also improving the click-through rate. CTR is 40% year-over-year. So as a business, we have a very strong top-of-the-funnel brand business. Brand has become a little healthier than it has been in prior years, and there's just a lot of budgets in brand, especially with large advertisers. We have significant unduplicated reach, so they're just users you can't find anywhere else unless you come to Reddit.
The second is the mid-funnel. The mid-funnel is when you start to get into performance, where you're really only paid if you drive a click, an actual, an action. And so by doing a lot of ML work, and, you know, we're at the beginning of that journey, that's what has driven the click volume, in addition to underlying user growth. So those are, you know, really efficient outcomes for advertisers, and revenue growth is really driven by both the cost of the outcome to the advertiser and the volume you're delivering, and we're able to do both at the same time right now, give them an efficient price, as well as deliver a volume of outcome. So that's the mid-funnel, big growth driver for us.
And then we're working on the bottom end of the funnel, which is applying ML and models in order to drive the next step of action, which is a purchase, an install, an add to cart, a deeper action beyond the click. That is a really attractive part of the market because it's very resilient to economic changes. It is also very competitive in that it is pretty heartless, in that it's by the numbers. You either hit the number or you don't, and you do, it unleashes budgets, and you continue to improve. But we think we have the raw materials to go after that business. Not every platform does. The reason why is because Redditors spend... The logged-in users spend over 25 minutes per user per day, so very, very high intent. And the users only come from two sources.
They either come directly to Reddit, intentionally to check in with a community and a conversation, or they are one click past search. So the intent is very high to look at actions, and best estimates about almost 40% of our new conversations are around products and services, so we know that there's high commercial intent. So that would be, on the advertising side, that's the roadmap for us. If you think about the top and the middle of the funnel, really driving immediate term and then laying down the tracks for the bottom of the funnel, for performance to have a full funnel solution. Those are the drivers of our business. That's from a what I call an objective standpoint.
If you look at it from a channel standpoint, we have grown our scale channel, which is the mid-market and SMB channel, faster than the average growth of our revenue. So that's been a growth driver for us. That's great, because in that segment are thousands of advertisers who are not yet on Reddit. There just can be so many more advertisers on our platform. So that, that's a really big opportunity for us to diversify the auction and have a lot more customers.
That's driven by bottom of funnel, you're saying. That they come-
They start at the middle of the funnel-
Okay.
And they tend to... They'll go up a little bit, the larger mid-market advertisers, but they mostly go down to performance. But they will start at the mid-end of the funnel. That's what the mid-end, mid part of the funnel unlocks, is that segment of advertiser.
One of the things that's interesting about even your logged-in users is they don't have to use their real name. When you're talking about advertisers, does that have an impact on the price they're willing to pay, since they don't actually know people's real names, so it's hard to track whether they actually bought something off of Reddit?
... It's a good question. The tracking is separate from the, so the anonymity. So all users on Reddit have an anonymous username, both logged in, I mean, even logged in, you have an ID, but it's, it's not your PII. And that's actually one of the benefits of Reddit. I think that was a long time myth, which is, if, if I operate under PII, you know, you know things that are true about me-
You better say what that means.
Under, like, personally identifiable information, like my name, Jen Wong, and that everything I wrote was true, that it... I updated it all the time correctly, and that I would be on good behavior because I was under my name. The fact is, that's just not true when you look at what's happened on other platforms. On Reddit, people are anonymous. What that allows for is that people can spend time in communities that they're interested in, they're really interested in, that is not what they want to project to friends and family. Your friends and family do not care if you're buying a new car. You might be expectant new parent, and you're not ready to reveal that.
You might have a health situation, like you might be dealing with something. Like, these are things that are private to you. You might be an avid gardener. I am. My friends could not care less about gardening. So what we see about people is so different than what they reveal on social media, and it turns out that's an incredible asset because we have an unduplicated targeting graph. We can find people, we can find parameters on people that you couldn't find in other platforms because they're not revealing those interests. So again, unduplicated targeting graph, you can find incremental customers. So it turns out that's actually very valuable. It does not affect the measurement in the sense that, you know... So, so from a targeting standpoint, it's different. We target by context and interest. We do not target by demographic.
We do not target by tracking you off property. Everything is first party on Reddit, which makes it very resilient, very logical in terms of the ads and the users, and we think more effective. So that's sort of on the targeting side. On the measurement side, remember, our logged-in users are a significant portion of our base today, and in fact, they are the bedrock of our inventory. So we do have emails and phone numbers for a lot of our users, and that's grown. You know, when I joined, it was something like 20%. Now that's, you know, increased to just below something like 50% and, you know, kind of bounced around with logged- out users.
But that's continued to grow, and the reason why is because so much of the user growth comes from mobile, and in mobile app environments, it's just very normal to log in. It's part of the behavior. And the second reason why is because when you log in, you get the first-class Reddit experience, where it retains your preferences on the communities that you've joined. So people are motivated to log in because it is a better experience. So the login rate will continue to grow, and when we have those parameters, that helps us do more matching, in addition to modeling and lookalikes.
Like Amazon finds that if somebody pays the $140 a year, they spend like 4 times as much money. Is that true in time and logged in versus logged- out users on Reddit?
It is true. The logged-in users are. They spend significantly more time. The logged- out users, a lot of them are one click past search , so their session length is significantly shorter. They might come in and look for an answer on a conversation page: "Hey, I want to know what the best vacuum is." They get their information, and they're good in that session. And that's okay because we want to be open. Reddit has benefited from the open internet. We don't put up a wall that says, "You must log in." They're not thinking about logging in at that moment. They want that information on what is the best vacuum.
Now, the good news is we can monetize them because we have the context of that page, and we can do keyword targeting, like search, on that page to say, "Okay, we can serve them a really effective ad, really high-value ad," because they are a high-intent, action-oriented user. It's just their session length is shorter than a session length of a logged-in user. But those are our future logged-in users.
They're still targeted. Like you said, they still have real high intent, like a search engine.
Exactly.
So yesterday, I don't know if you saw, but Google did a whole day about generative AI, introducing generative AI across all of their product line, really. But one of the things they're doing is much more with search, and generative AI is going to deliver you answers, deliver you information, verbally. You know, if you put your camera up, it will do it. So, I mean, they're bringing gen AI because they're under criticism over OpenAI's lead. Does this actually negatively affect Reddit, that search is going to become more, let me call it proactively interactive. You know, the gen AI will allow search, meaning Google search, to become more, deliver more information seamlessly, so they don't have to go to Reddit past the. They don't have to go in the click to answer the best vacuum question on Reddit?
Look, I think it's really early. I, I did see the announcement. There were a slew, it was pretty much-
Yeah
... in everything, and it, you know, what a difference a year makes-
Yeah
... in terms of, what they put forth. It's really interesting. Search will evolve, and, it will evolve, and it, it, you know, they've talked about having a generative experience in search. And but I think, you know, if you just zoom out, why, why is Reddit so important to search today? Like, why is Reddit showing up in so many of the searches, search results? The reason why is because Reddit is the biggest corpus of authentic human experience that is not tainted by commercial affiliates. It's not auto-generated. It's actually human thoughts, and it regenerates so quickly.
You know, you have a new car, somebody's going to have an opinion on that new car model immediately in a subreddit, and it's going to be indexed, and it's going to be one of the few sources of information that is like a real person who actually drove that car with the family and said, "This is what I think about it." And so that's why we win in search... you could summarize over that, but you're not going to get the textural detail of what that person and the conversation that happened between another 50 people who had that experience. You actually want that detail. So I think, while there might be summarization, people always want the threaded detail on the conversation pages. That's what we see on Reddit.
So we'll always have the freshest information, the most authentic, from in terms of, I think, human ideas and experience, and I think that our value just goes up in the world of AGI. I really believe that. As there's more synthetic content, there's more summarization, you want to know what the source is. You want to know what the real scoop is from a person, what they actually said, and what multiple people said about a product or a service, and who's going to regenerate that data? The models have to summarize something. What are they going to summarize? They might try to summarize the information on Reddit, but it regenerates so quickly, and the opinions evolve so quickly. It's really important to get that fine-grain detail.
The final thing I'll say is, remember, a lot of our traffic comes directly, and they come both for information, so the search seekers come for information, obviously, but the ones who are logged in, they come not only for information, they come for the community. In the end, who's going to help you stop drinking? Who's going to help you with parenting advice? It's going to be real people, real people who have had the same human experience and the feeling of being in it together, and you can't summarize over that, and that is what people come to Reddit for, in addition to the information. It's that whole experience, the feeling of being a part of that community and sharing that experience.
I do agree with you that as the whole society moves towards screens, which is really isolating, that the people are looking for community in other ways. So Reddit does fill this growing need that gen AI is essentially taking away, in addition to the information. When you think about growing logged in versus logged- out users, do you have to do different things to grow those, or do you just focus on growing logged-in users, that's your total focus because their economic value is higher to you?
Well, the majority of our focus is really on logged-in users. That's taking friction out of the login. It's improving the ML feed and the recommendations so that they can find their home on Reddit. It's those fundamentals. It's taking friction out of posting. So that's a lot of our work are the basics of Reddit. We do do work to grow logged-out users, so we've dramatically improved the speed and performance of our mobile platform, called Shreddit. So the speed at which Google is able to index the content and see the freshness of the information on Reddit has... The time is compressed, and so that does allow logged-out users who are searchers to find the information faster and for us to rank better. So speed matters in terms of allowing people to have access.
So we do have. But they are two separate strategies in that we are not trying to immediately in session, convert a logged-out user who came from search to sign up in that session. We did that once upon a time, but that's not the mindset that they're in. The strategy is more, let's let people enjoy the best of Reddit, find what they need, find the information they want from search, and typically, they come numerous times, and then one day they realize, "I should probably download this thing called Reddit, because I'm here all the time, and it seems pretty good." And then, what we see in the app store is a very consistent cadence of unattributed installs.
We don't spend any money on marketing, so it is really self-driven installs, with combination of word of mouth or finally having that experience of, "Wow, Reddit's so good, I'm going to download." That's, you know, kind of how the, the funnel works. So logged out is kind of upper, upper funnel. It's marketing for us. It's marketing how great Reddit's content is for us, so that one day you say, "You know what? I want that every day," and I come into the app.
Okay. And you mentioned SMBs bringing more of like the Facebook, the million advertisers, but you have also said that you need self-service. You need a better self-service experience to bring on those people. So can you talk about what you're doing on the self-service side?
Yeah. So look, I think simplicity is just good practice for every ad platform and for all advertisers.
That's true.
If you look at our business, look, we're still small. We have so much opportunity. Even in large advertisers today, we can have a much bigger share of wallet relative to our audience size. So, I don't want to rule that out as an opportunity. That is an opportunity to go deeper. And if you look at some portfolios, we are 15% penetrated in terms of their portfolio of brands. Just a really big opportunity to go deeper. On top of that, because Reddit covers 100,000 communities in a broad range of topics, we think we can have thousands more advertisers on our platform as well, and a lot of them will end up being mid-market or SMB advertisers. And it is true, those advertisers require performance, and they require simplicity and automation.
So that's an area that we continue to invest in, both performance and automation, to move down in terms of the size of advertiser. Before we get to self-serve, we will just-- we will go lighter in business models. So we started at a-
Sorry, lighter?
Lighter in terms of our service models. So our... Just to give you an example, we started with the top 300 advertisers. They are full service, managed. We started hands-on keyboard ourselves. We've now moved to a hybrid model, where they have hands-on keyboard, we have hands-on keyboard together... mid-market advertisers, you go direct to the buyer, there's no agency, it's pretty much performance driven. You test. Some of them go 100% hands-on keyboard, sometimes we're there in a hybrid model assisting, but generally it's a lighter service model, and you can have a lot more accounts per rep because of the lighter service model. Then you get into SMB. SMB for us, we do have managed SMB, where we give a touch, so it's not fully self-service. We do this through vendor partners.
Very high scale, lots of accounts per rep, but that's okay. We give them lightweight tools. As we make the tools simpler and more automated, they're able to manage with a little bit of customer service help from us. And then you get to self-service, which we have a channel today. Folks come in, three steps, swipe a credit card, set it, and they go. And that channel is just not our biggest channel yet, and that's okay. We will be focused on growing that channel, but we have all these three channels in terms of graded service models that we wanna move through. There are just thousands of advertisers in mid-market and managed SMB that we want to address even ahead of self-serve, that can get us ad diversity.
Oh, all right, so self-service sounds like it's a little further in the future than I was thinking. It—I thought it was imminent, but it sounds like it's a little further in the future.
It is there, but it's not our focus because we have these opportunities. And these, the advertisers along the way, it's worth it, right? So a managed SMB is a larger SMB customer. When you give them a little bit of a customer service touch, the average revenue per advertiser is more significant than a self-serve advertiser.
Okay, that's actually super helpful. Appreciate that. So can you talk about global expansion? You guys have a roadmap for that. When does international contribute to Reddit's profits rather than just costs?
Well, international is actually a contributor today. It's about 18% to 19% of our revenue, grew 30% year-over-year. Look, there's just a lot more headroom there. We're still, we're still small. We're still small in markets like U.K. and markets, you know, in, in EMEA, even in Canada, relative to our penetration in terms of the population. So, you know, we'll continue to invest in those markets as, you know, as, as we grow. I do think international is a really significant user opportunity for us, and the ads business always follows the growth of the users. Today, our demography is 50/50, pretty much outside of the U.S. and inside the U.S., but we are standing on the cusp of, I think, a really interesting next arc for global conversation.
So I think it's been our dream to always have global communities as well as local communities, so you can have r/Brot in Germany, just about German bread, but to have a global community in Ask Reddit, which is about the universal human experience, and the only way to do that is to take out language friction, so that somebody who only speaks French can talk to somebody who only speaks English. And now, with translation, with AI, that is coming, and we've been testing that in French, and we are so encouraged by what we're seeing. The ability for the language friction to go away, for the communities to have really thriving conversations across languages, across borders, and for that content to be indexed just like it is in English, you know, into Google, for...
in, into search. So that's really, really exciting to see. And if you just imagine the possibilities, we've done it in French, you think about the myriad of languages that we can expand into, and that is our plan. I think that could be really transformative for our ability to scale globally, because unlike other platforms, a lot of platforms operate in video. Video is pretty universal, doesn't have language friction. Reddit does, because we're majority conversation and text, and so we've had this chicken and egg cold start problem where we knew Reddit would eventually be in all languages and have all these different topics, but that it would take time because of that extra friction. But now, with AI-powered translation, that can be greatly accelerated. So that, I think, is-
Let me push on that a little bit. So you may recall, I was the head of strategy for Vivendi, and sitting in Paris, actually, and one of the things I did is I tried to bonus the eight people that worked for me, and they never had bonuses before, and none of... I said, "I want a business plan, I want, you know, what's your professional goals?
Yeah.
None of them would do it, because it's a 70-cent marginal tax rate. So if I was going to give them an extra dollar, 70 cents was going to the government, none of them would do it. So, I mean, so that's my question, is if you have these Americans speaking in English over here, now I'm just going to happen to translate it to France, the value systems are really different. Advice that somebody would give here would not—or the French would give to an American, and be like: What are you talking about? That's the worst advice ever. We have a little sharper elbows. We work a lot harder.
Mm-hmm.
We sort of live to work, and they sort of work to live. Like, is it really, is it really an opportunity to somehow... Like, is it really a smart idea to start trying to take American values and shove them down the French's throat? Because they get annoyed by us.
See, I don't view it that way. I actually was smiling when you were saying that, because I thought that would be a really great conversation. I mean, I, as a parent, I've read, I don't-- A lot of people have read what, the French parenting book, the Danish parenting book, right? A lot of people have done that because it's just interesting to see different philosophies and approach to something that's important, and I think work-life balance is a great topic to talk about globally. You know, should we have a 30-hour week? I mean, these are, these are great conversations to have. So I actually think our community's become more vibrant. I don't think it's... You know, the moderators will make sure it's not somebody shoving a value down somebody's throat. It's more an interesting conversation. Like, that's a good-- That is a great conversation.
That might be inspiring to somebody to realize, "You know what? Maybe I do belong somewhere else," and that's okay.
... Okay. I don't know. I, I will see, 'cause they told me, "Oh, France is the most like the U.S." It was nothing like the U.S.
I believe that!
Everything that would come out of my mouth, the French people were like: "What is she saying?" Like, our whole basis, I think, of assumptions is really different in capitalism-
Yes.
than it is to socialism.
That's what makes it fun, to have that conversation. I would, I would say, that I find that fun.
I guess if you're going for advice, though, it isn't always the best advice, either direction, really. They had Wednesdays off. Their kids were home on Wednesdays. I'm like: "If you want to take Wednesdays off and come in on Saturdays when your kids are at school..." They're like: "Why would we do that?" I'm like, "I guess it's a dumb idea.
Well, yes, I'll share with you some research we've done about words, right? So we have video on Reddit, but we have not been, video is not our dominant format. We're in words, and there have been moments where we thought: "Well, gosh, we're words, and everybody's moving to pictures." And we've done a lot of research about words and conversation, and what it shows is that if you really want to change somebody's fundamental point of view, you actually need words, because words allow you to express more complex thoughts-
That's true.
more nuanced thoughts.
That's true.
And to change someone's mind, you actually need multiple different points of view, not just sound bites of the same thing. If I wanted to change, say, "Laura, you should be vegan," it can't just be: it's because of the animals. It has to be: it's health, it's vegan. It's like all these reasons, good for the environment, like, all these different reasons and arguments, so that we can have a dialogue that might actually change how you think. And you see this in the subreddit, r/ChangeMyMind, where people willfully go in and have long dialogues about fundamental beliefs and question them. And I say that just because I think that is the, that actually is the magic and the joy of Reddit, is that, is that nuance and that ability to change people's fundamental beliefs because you're having a conversation about it.
I would argue that Reddit is the right place to have such disparate points of view and conversation, because it can be done civilly, in a way that actually might affect, I think, people's beliefs in a really positive way that opens up maybe a new aspect of who they are.
Mm-hmm. Well, definitely going offshore will do that. Because there's a bunch of assumptions we make as Americans that we don't even know we make, until you run into another culture that doesn't make those-
Right
... particular assumptions. Let's talk about the competitive environment. So, just sort of building on your point about video, I do think that Amazon is trying to connect an ad unit on a big screen to the purchase. So, typically, what I would say, top-of-funnel advertising opportunity, they're trying to tie it all the way down to the actual purchase. And so my question is: do advertising alternatives that don't have that drive to purchase become less valuable? Does everything else come under CPM pressure or cost per thousand pressure, pricing pressure? Because now Amazon is gonna lead the way, and Walmart's gonna be a fast follower, to try to tie the ad unit directly to the purchase.
Look, I think from a marketer's point of view, there's been a lot of research over the last couple of years about brand and performance, and has the emphasis and focus on performance sort of had long-term effects on brand. And I think, you know, there's a fair amount of research that shows that you want to be balanced across the funnel. You, marketers, you want to be outcome focused, you want to think about your price, you want to think about the volume you're getting, but at the same time, you're balancing across these two things because they work in concert. Brand can enhance the value at the bottom of the funnel, right? And so I would say, I fundamentally believe that there will still be full-funnel advertising.
And there are ebbs and flows in the industry, depending on what the economic backdrop is, where you emphasize performance more than brand, etcetera, but I think that will stay. You know, in terms of CTV, it's possible. It's possible that it'll become more performative and more measured. I don't know. It's not, it's not my experience, so my, you know, data point of one, I don't sit and have my phone ready for a purchase or a QR code when I'm watching videos, but in bed at night, but it's possible that that happens. It's the spirit is right. I think it's, you know, what marketers want is more measured media.
But I don't, that doesn't affect us in the sense that our proposition, like, we win if we do what we do well, and what we do is so different. We want to be a leader in contextual and interest-based advertising, which is based on our first-party data, which is based on converting the intent on Reddit into action and awareness. And it's just so radically different. And so where we all compete is to make sure that marketers get an efficient price for the outcome and the volume of outcomes that they want. And that can be across any marketing mix. So I just don't think about trying to be tied to one format. It is true that budgets can be segmented that way. What I try to think about is the total proposition and actually trying to sit above the budgets.
And, you know, so when we started, for example, everybody put us in the social media bucket. Like: "Oh, you're a biddable platform, private, large UGC, social media." That's a very specific, narrow bucket that's bought a specific way. We worked really hard to educate people that, one, we are a community platform. We actually have none of the social media dynamics. We have a buying mechanism that looks like that, that's good, but it's different. And now we have conversation pages, which are high-context pages where people are reading about specific products and services, where you can keyword target in, and that looks a little bit more like search, because you might be bidding at a keyword or a very specific topical level, and you're in context, or has aspects of being like a publisher, where you're, you know, buying a topical page.
And so now we've moved to, okay, let's try to be agnostic to where the budgets sit. Let's talk about the proposition, and we float above many different budgets to make a total proposition for marketers. And I think that that's taken a little bit of time because marketers are very budget focused. But I think it's a better position for us to be in, so that we're not narrowly defined by a format. And I don't think we should be, because Reddit's very different and very expansive in what contextual and interest-based targeting can be.
Questions from the audience? Okay, I'll keep going then. Okay, so we're gonna go to data licensing next, but let's talk about how is Reddit internally using gen AI and AI to make its ad products better today? And what's your roadmap?
Yeah. I mean, we're so excited about gen AI, not only for advertising, but for our core consumer product, right? So we talked about translation. We obviously- we're using AI. We built this LLM for, just for, our platform, which helps with Post Guidance . So a lot of new users try to make a post, and it fails because it doesn't meet the stringent criteria of the subreddit rules. And this helps get them through that and figure out, "Okay, if I just make these edits, I'll actually have my post go live." So it's a much better experience. AI will be really helpful in moderator tools as well and helping them scale. So it'll allow them do more of the day-to-day work, and then they can focus on growth. So-
Maybe you should go through that slower.
Yeah
... like the pieces, 'cause you're taking for granted, maybe people don't know how you actually get a post up on Reddit.
Yeah.
You've now joined, you're a logged-in user, you want to post. Turns out, no, you can't just post. Like in Twitter, it just goes. But you guys don't... You have a moderator. Tell them about the steps-
Yeah
... and what you're talking about with this.
Yeah, so on Reddit, in order to post, you have to, one, find the right community to post in, which AI can be very helpful in matching you to a community. Let's say you're trying to figure out a car part, which car part, which car community should I post that in? The second step is, to post, you have to follow a set of rules, the subreddit rules, and then they might be very specific. So in r/science, which is a community dedicated to talking about scientific research, you can only talk about research, I think, that's been reviewed in the last six months. It has to be very recent. It has to be peer reviewed. And so it'll help you, remind you of these rules, so that your post actually goes live into the community.
There are some subreddits where they say, "Ask Reddit." This is a good example. You have to ask an open-ended question with a question mark. You don't put a question mark, your post isn't going up. Very small thing, but that alone can create a very bad experience for you, where your post is rejected. Those are up to the community to make those rules and enforce those rules. We can help users have a more successful posting experience and help moderators give advice, right? A moderator might be annoying to have to give that advice. "Hey, question mark. Remember, question mark." We can use computers to do that, right? We use technology to do that.
So that, I think, is really, it's really exciting because there's a lot of posts that don't make it through today, and that's just more content and conversations that can help Reddit be even better.
The machines can help make that-
Exactly.
Can tell-
Exactly.
It would be like what I use in chat, where the computer would say, "Hey, you forgot to put a question mark.
Yeah
... or, "Hey, you, it's more than six months old, what you're referring to—
Right.
and this particular subreddit requires a six-month...
Reminder, check the date on the research. So that's on the consumer side, and there's an endless list of things like that that can really take out friction from the user experience and from moderating. Then, on the ad side, all throughout the platform, there's opportunity, right? You saw us launch an AI headline generator, which, for SMBs, is great because they don't have to think about making Reddit-y copy, which does help with the performance of ads. So the AI headline generator, you can actually put in your URL, it'll just give you ideas, and you can choose, and you have your ad created that feel Reddit-y. So that takes out creative friction, for example. Insights is a really important part of how our advertisers start thinking about how to work on Reddit. We have bought a company called Spiketrap.
They're experts in natural language processing. That's now been integrated into our tool called Reddit Pro, which is a free profile for businesses to get online on Reddit, be active in communities, and do some listening, some listening analytics to figure out where the conversations are happening about their product or about their brand. That-
Keyword search, like they, if it's Coca-Cola, they search Coke, and then anywhere on Reddit where Coke is being talked about?
Keyword and category.
Okay.
Yeah, it'd be keyword and category based.
Okay, and they have to pay for that, or they don't?
No, it's free.
Oh, it's free.
It's free. We don't charge for that.
Okay. Okay.
I think there's been a real evolution in our thinking. Reddit was really built for people. It was built for, each user was one individual, and now I think we are evolving to also expand that vision because we believe that Reddit is a really good partner to businesses in many different ways. One, because they can get information that helps them think about, "How do I engage with certain communities that matter to me? What communities should I care about, and how do I want to show up with those communities?" So that's Reddit Pro allows an organic entry point for organizations and businesses. Obviously, we have our advertising platform, where you can now transact against those audiences and expand them and apply marketing.
And then we have data licensing, where some, you know, businesses can take advantage of, obviously, the data that Reddit has to garner more business insights or build models, or through the partnerships that we have with social analytics companies, a lot of businesses benefit from being able to mine Reddit data in social analytics companies to do even deeper listening. So I think we've had just a much more expansive view about Reddit for businesses, I'd say over the last year and a half, that we're really excited about.
How is it different today, looking forward, in how you think about monetizing Reddit for businesses? How is it different than 18 months ago?
It's a much more comprehensive suite of tools for businesses. So the Reddit Pro is not about monetization, it's about engaging businesses on Reddit, because it makes our communities better when businesses, and brands, and organizations, you know, everyone from the NBA to Netflix to a beauty company, are on our platform organically engaging with our communities. They're talking about their brands and players, and-
It doesn't pollute the-
all the time
... authenticity of the-- I thought one of the things you said, the competitive advantage-
Yeah
... is people are talking about real feelings.
Yes.
If Netflix is in there constantly pushing Netflix, isn't that diluting the impartiality of the conversation on Reddit?
Well, they have to follow the subreddit rules, and a lot of subreddits have rules where they say: "Look, this is not. You're not selling in this subreddit. We're having conversation." You have to follow the rules. So in an organic space, and this is, they're Netflix and Washington Post, and that, they're organizations that have been doing this for years. They follow the rules and the spirit of the community. That's the idea. Now, they don't all have to engage. They can decide that they want to get insights and decide that they want to engage on their profile page, which is almost like their community, because they haven't had a space before. So now they actually have a space, which is their own profile, which is sort of their own community.
Or they can engage in communities that are moderated by Redditors, but they follow the rules. Everybody follows the rules about the spirit and the culture of those communities, and it's actually been really successful. The NFL is sharing highlights. They're, I mean, they did an AMA at the Pro Bowl. I mean, just, they're having fun.
AMA?
An Ask Me Anything.
Okay.
So they had— They actually at the Pro Bowl sent some of the moderators there to the front line, and they actually created content for the subreddit that was in conjunction with the NFL. Like, that's— That's what the fans want. That's what the people in the subreddit want. They're so excited to do that. So that's why I think they're... It really unleashes a lot more engagement and a lot of fun for the communities, because they're talking about these organizations, and teams, and companies, and brands.
Mm-hmm. Okay, so you think it really elevates, it really elevates the conversation to have the actual brand in the conversation?
I do.
Okay. Well, it's for sure good for the brands. Do you, do you charge for it?
No.
It's all free.
We don't charge for it.
I don't like that part. I'm a Wall Street analyst, so I don't like that part. You know, you're sounding French to me. You know, I don't like that. I want you to charge money. Okay.
We believe that those people will become advertisers.
Okay. Is that the goal, to turn them into advertisers?
I believe a lot of those customers can become advertisers, because once you see the vibrancy of Reddit and the communities, you see future customers, and then that's the opportunity where we can bring you into the marketing platform. So I view that as lead gen for our ads platform.
Okay. That makes sense, actually. Okay, so let's talk about data licensing next. Can you share Reddit's philosophy on data privacy, given its ownership of all this first-party data, and you only actually advertise using your first-party data, which is so far protected by all the governments?
Right. So for years, we've had a user privacy policy, and that protects. We believe users should have control over their data, and, you know, that, that's been privacy as a right. It's been a cornerstone of one of the principles of the Reddit platform. What you saw last week is we released a public content policy, and the public content policy says: We love being open. We have been a beneficiary of the open internet. We want people to be able to get the information they need, but we have to have rules around that, because there are crawlers and scrapers that are unidentified or have purposes that are not... You know, that could be bad actors, and we want to make sure that users are respected, their edits, their deletions, that nobody's trying to target them, that we're, you know...
And we, we obviously prevent that, right? They're not, we don't allow user data to travel in terms of their private DMs, and messages, and emails, and we don't sell that data. So we have very specific rules. We've been clear that if companies are accessing Reddit data, we have to know what the purpose is of that. You know, research is very clear. We have a path for researchers. We believe in research. That exists. We'll continue to support research. But folks who are coming, and scraping, and benefiting commercially, we need to have a conversation with. And so that's just making transparent how our set of principles around public content, that allows. It says there have to be some rules for how our data is accessed.
Those two pieces are foundational to allowing us to continue to have a dialogue with other partners about data licensing, because those are foundational to anybody who wants to get access to Reddit data with commercial purposes for, you know, LLM training or AI training, or whatever it is. And I think that's really important. I think you'll see more of this, because it's really important to us that our users are clear about how we are protecting their privacy and the content of Reddit.
But do you foresee a day where you're making a lot of money because you're using these conversations to train LLMs, and they want a share of the money? 'Cause really, it's they're, they're creating the value that you're then turning around and selling to the LLM.
Well, we do want Redditors to make money, and that's the user economy. That's the third part of our businesses, right? So we have advertising, which is the most mature, and yet, I think, still very early. Lots of opportunity there. We have data licensing, and then we have the user economy. So the user economy is our vision for where we want users to be able to transact with each other, where they can have services between each other, and they can actually have an exchange of currency. So you're gonna see us. So, there's a couple things that come together in that. It's a set of features that come together. So the first is the developer platform.
We've been working on this for a while now, where there are hundreds of developers on this platform today who are building tools that sit on top of Reddit. They're expanding what a subreddit could be. Today, subreddits are mostly places of altruistic conversation, is how I describe them. But they're expanding what Reddit, what subreddits can do by making... Today, WallStreetBets has a stock ticker with, you know, the biggest trending stocks. They're making games, you know, chess games, et cetera, interactive games that make subreddits more fun. They're making scoreboards that process data for sports subreddits, right, who are digesting stats.
So that's just the beginning of the kernels of ideas that they have today, but you can just think for all subreddits, there might be just different toolkits and post types that can make that subreddit go beyond conversation. So that's the developer piece, and they can have an exchange eventually. You could buy apps. You can buy things in those apps and experiences. You can pay developers, and that, you know, is effectively user to user. So that is something that we're actively working on, we're really excited about. I think that can unleash just a dramatically different experience on-
But I have a question about branding, 'cause one of the things you said early on is, "These conversations do not have a commercial component." One of the differentiating things, and the reason there is unique reach, is 'cause there isn't somebody trying to have a hidden agenda to sell a product.
Right.
So whereas you guys have subreddits that are like little r/AskMeAnything , should these be under C, meaning commercial, or E, for e-commerce? Because it feels like conflating these loses the lack of hidden agenda over on the conversation. It should be very clearly labeled that over here.
Sure.
We're selling stuff.
Yeah.
There will be hidden agendas. I want to sell you my stained glass or, you know, to me, these feel fairly a conflict.
It's a great question. It is one of the core principles on Reddit that everything be clear and transparent and about intention. And so, that is a principle that, you know, is very important to us. I think for these scoreboards and these games, so ahead of paid exchange, they're fine in the existing subreddits, because they are enhancing the existing experience. Where you're going to see payment is, we're doing two pieces of work. One is evolving our award system, which is where people pay for custom-designed awards today, and second is evolving Reddit Gold, which is our virtual currency. So the virtual currency is what will fuel the economy on Reddit, so we're doing those two pieces of work.
So I, I'm less worried about that today, that day may come, but more about the fundamentals of, okay, how do we get the currency and the paid award system, the next iteration of that going, while starting to cultivate a vibrant set of interesting, valuable use cases for developers? Let's get excited about the creations of the developers, and then I, I think we always believe the economic exchange comes once there's value. But let's, let's get excited about the creativity. Let's unleash the creativity first.
Okay. Well, that'd be bad if people got really mad that they're now being sold to. Like, people get mad-
Right
... when like, you know, they Netflix suddenly, you know, raises price or forces them into an ad-driven tier. They don't like change.
Yes.
If you undermine your core value proposition of just going to have a conversation without economic agenda, to me, you might really irritate the core business-
Yes
... and the new business of a user economy will take a decade to build.
It will take a long time to build. It is a very deep change in-
Yeah
user behavior. But remember, subreddits are, I think, self-inoculated to … They have their own culture, right? So they have rules against selling or shilling.
Yeah
in subreddits that are enforced, and the second is they have cultures where, even if it's not explicit, they have a culture that either supports or doesn't support that, and every single user is a moderator through voting. And so if a brand... Trust me, we've seen this over-
You should explain the voting.
... and over again, right? So-
You should explain the voting.
So every post on Reddit starts with zero votes. I told you it has to be posted into a subreddit, which is the place that is more, most sort of qualified to comment on the quality of that post, because they're topical, kind of topically interested, self-selected folks, right? So if you have a post about politics, the political subreddit, those people know about politics. They can determine whether that content's good, and then it might, you know, more people might see it if it actually has more upvotes than downvotes. So because every post on Reddit starts with zero, which is not the case in social media, where you have a follower model, and somebody who has a lot of followers can post something good or bad, it will cut through from a distribution standpoint. Doesn't matter on Reddit. Starts with zero.
Every post lives on its own merit, so every individual gets a vote, and you have to get thousands of individual people to say, "This is good. I'm gonna vote it up." If something's controversial, it will also get voted down... and so the net of the two might be right back at zero. In order to have a post that gets a lot of views, you have to have the net ups be higher than the net downs, and each person gets one vote. So it is hard, like, when you look at thousands of people who know a topic and are interested in a topic, that's what filters the quality on Reddit. That's what prevents bad content, because people might filter for a bunch of reasons.
Mm-hmm.
They might filter because it's topically incorrect. They might say, "This is just not adding value." They might say, "This is offensive, like, the way it's written is just, you know, offensive. It's against our culture. People shouldn't see this." There are so many reasons why people will create a boundary that says this is in or out.
Mm-hmm.
That system has worked very well for us.
But it-
So commercial intent-
I was gonna say-
would be the same, would go into this.
Right.
Would be the same. People would say, "You know what? This is either violating our rule against commercial intent, this is not adding value because it's clearly self-promotional. Down vote it, it's not gonna get seen.
But then you can't do the user economy unless you do it along a side, under a different set of an R, with a different set of rules around commercial rules. 'Cause you could set up different, I'm gonna call them subreddits, but I really wanna call them like the e-Reddit, where it's actually that commercial intent is why you use an E instead of the R.
You could do that. Like I said, the most important thing is that the experiences are good. No one's gonna pay for anything if the experiences aren't amazing, right? The things you would pay for are, "This game is so good, I want my avatar," or, "I want to unlock the next level." That's what you would pay for.
Okay.
Or, "This scoreboard and this stats package is so good, I need access to it so that I can play with it," right? It has to add value. It's not, you know, the-- that's why we call it an economy, because we're not pushing these things. They have to naturally-- just like a post on Reddit, they have to be good.
Mm.
If they're good, that is what. Then people will come and say, "Okay, I'm gonna pay for that. I'm gonna pay for access to that. I'm gonna pay for a little bit more engagement on that." So, the fundamental system, I think, is the same.
Okay, and how does the user economy get phased in? Like, how do we see that in, in Reddit? Do we-- is it just like it's gonna be granular, like individual subreddits will have, like, the scoreboard or the game? There'll be-- so there'll be, you know, 10 of these sprinkled across all the Reddits? Is that...? Because there's 10,000 subreddits, so like-
Hundred thousand.
Yeah. Okay.
Mm-hmm.
So how does this... There isn't a single place, there's not a marketplace that we can sort of track? How did-
It's a good question. Right now, it's being tested in different subreddits. And so it's really driven by the interest of the subreddits, right? We want moderators and subreddits to embrace this new idea and new post type. And we like that. That's typically... We want to build this with our community.
Okay, all right. So it won't be a metric that we get, like how many subreddits have these?
It's early.
Okay.
It's early. But if you're a Reddit user, you can start to see the experience in the subreddits I mentioned.
Okay. And how do you make money from this? I get how it adds value to your community, which probably elongates engagement length. I get that part. But is there any-
Yeah
... vig for Reddit itself?
If you were just to imagine the possibilities, because we are sort of the, the platform on which everybody builds. We provide that, the developer platform, right? The code base, the hosting. In the transactions, we would be a facilitator of the transactions-
Okay
... and therefore, we would participate in that.
Okay.
Yeah.
Okay, all right. So when they're buying the scoreboard or when they're buying something that they feel valuable. Okay. Okay, that makes sense. All right, so going back to the licensing. One of the things that Reddit said on its first quarter call is that they had done—you had done several seven-figure deals with social listening firms. Why don't you... What are they buying, and how many more social listening firms are there? And why don't you explain what social listening is for?
Yeah. So these social analytics firms, so we announced Cision was one example. They, what they do is they take in data from a lot of different sources, and they provide... And for us, it's a filtered fire hose. So the fire hose is real-time data-
Okay
... from Reddit. They do this for, peer platforms, too. And they provide filters and insights, on it for a lot of different companies. A lot of marketers use it, just general business professionals use it, in order to figure out changes in consumer trends when they're building strategy, when they're thinking about building marketing campaigns, et cetera. So this is, a really common, you know, it's an industry that's been around for years. It's actually well-established in terms of the social analytics and the licensing that they've done in terms of the data, and we've signed a number of these deals, and we'll continue to do that. There's a, there's a lot of these, of these firms. They're smaller deals. You know, they're 6, 7-figure deals, but they are... It's a well-established market.
It's really good for Reddit because, like I said, the end user is typically a business who is trying to make business decisions, get insights to make, to start a marketing campaign, whatever it is. That helps, again, bring us more upper funnel in terms of the minds of business decision-makers as they're garnering insights and doing planning. That's really good for us, in addition to being a business.
Okay. Questions? Any questions? Okay, great. I'm gonna—so one of the things Steve said that troubled me, in answer to my question on the call, was that he said, there would be terms under which he would not do a deal with one of the big LLMs. And we, on Wall Street, think about the big LLMs. It's the Amazon LLMs, it's the Google, which you already have a deal with them, and it's the OpenAI. Like, these guys that are gonna pay $200 million, the way Google did, for its LLM. Can you walk through, like, under what kind of scenarios would you not take $200 million, basically?
I mean, it's the things that I talked about before. We have a set of principles around user privacy, and a set of principles around, now, our public content policy. And we want to make sure that whoever has access to Reddit data is using it appropriately, that in a way that respects user edits and deletions, isn't using it for, you know, targeting purposes, isn't using it to create a competitor to Reddit. So these things are, you know, using it in a way that, where whatever they're building, Reddit is represented appropriately in the product, and not disintermediated, but also, you know, uses the data in a way that we think makes sense. So yeah, there's a lot... All of these partnerships are, they're complicated, they're pretty bespoke.
I think we're being very thoughtful about them. We announced Google, we announced Cision. Clearly, there's a path to doing both the social analytics deals and data licensing deals, right? There's a path because we've announced two of them.
Yeah.
So it's not intractable, it's just that these are really important, I think, for ensuring that whoever the partner is, is, you know, acting appropriately regarding what is really important to us, which is the corpus of Reddit data. I think we're being very thoughtful because the landscape is so new and it is so dynamic, so we are not committing ourselves forever to anything. I don't think anybody is, and that's fine. You know, if there's value there and these partnerships make sense to endure, they will. If not, we have incredible amount of opportunity with our own data to build products and services for our users, I mentioned some of them before, on our platform. So if I just zoom out, this is just, you know, the economic exchange is just one piece of the puzzle here.
Yes, that is one way that Reddit can get value, but again, if you just zoom out on the bigger arc here, yes, there's going to be an emergence of a lot more infusion of AI into everything we do. Search is likely going to evolve. Reddit is not—Reddit's value is going to go up, because where are you going to find a place that has the original ideas, the original conversation that regenerates so quickly from humans, that every single model needs to train on?
It's true.
Where are you going to get fresh ideas? Reddit. And that's why our value has been increasing in existing search, and why I think our value as a platform and company just continues to grow as our corpus grows, and as it grows more globally, and as there's more synthetic and summarized content. Our data becomes more important to train on for freshness, and it becomes more important for people to get the authentic, real, unadulterated human experience and ideas. So that's why, you know, these are all over. You know, over the next three to five years, don't know what the landscape is going to hold, but if you believe that thesis, and we strongly, strongly believe that, we will benefit from having this, from having this corpus and being the platform that we are.
So, you know, whether it turns out in a line in the revenue line, in the P&L, you know, one partnership, multiple, that's how I think about it. I just zoom out and say, "I know we have something incredibly important and valuable here that either is going to accrue value in the company and/or through data licensing or across both.
It's funny because none of the things you just articulated are how I think about the value of Reddit. What I think of the value of Reddit that is unique, that is not substitutable-
Yeah
... is how people use words. Because the English language, Americans allow the English language to update-
Yes
... and to be used where it's. And so if you say, "Give me the coolest bar in in, in L.A." to Gen, in fact, ChatGPT, it needs to know that cool isn't a temperature idea in that context, but the way it can learn that is from Reddit-
Yes
... with real people using words today.
Yes.
That actually isn't substitutable with USA Today or The Washington Post, who are all written at the twelfth-grade level.
Correct.
That isn't how you answer normal people-
Yes
... when you're teaching them this.
New jargon.
Yes.
New, new products.
Buzzwords.
New buzzwords, new products, new cultures and vibes and descriptions.
The latest product in the auto category-
The latest product, the new car came out-
Yeah
... you have to review it.
The bumpers are weird or-
Exactly
... it looks like a tank or-
So all of those things are part of the real-life human experience, that some human has to go interact with the world in.
Yes.
And then it gets made into, like, a post or an artifact on Reddit.
Right.
There's just no other place that does that at that scale, at that breadth, and at that speed.
Mm-hmm
... at which it happens so quickly.
Right. And if somebody asks gen AI about it, it has to have an answer, and the product may have come out yesterday.
Right.
The only people that would have that answer with a lot of data would be Reddit, 'cause I'm sure, like, the press covers it, but it's not enough data.
Right.
These LLMs are so big. I mean, they just sop up data.
Yes, they—
They're running out of data to run.
They're running out of data.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, I assume that the big models like OpenAI and Anthropic on Amazon, I assume they don't have problems with these terms. They're not trying to recreate Reddit, presumably, and they're trying. I assume that they're willing to go abide by your terms, the big ones.
I can't comment on deals that we haven't announced.
Okay.
But I think we've made it clear what's important to us.
Mm-hmm.
We obviously have a partnership.
We do.
So, we think that's tractable, and-
Meaning replicable?
Yeah.
Okay.
Meaning we think that these principles that we have and rules about how to engage, we think don't limit the value of a data license and a partnership. So, but I can't comment on any deals that we have.
Yeah, okay. Well, Wall Street will be disappointed if we don't end up with deals with every one of the big, big LLMs. But to your point, I don't know how they can keep up with real-time, real-time answers without something like Reddit.
Mm-hmm.
I don't know where the number two is. Like, if they don't do a deal with you, who are they doing a deal with?
Don't know.
So anyway, I think it's interesting that 90%, I think it's 90% of your revenue still come... Your user growth is faster in the U.S., and isn't it like 75% of your revenue comes from the U.S.?
80%, yeah.
80%. Yeah, I think that's really interesting. I would have guessed that with the user growth, so much higher offshore, that... Is that just 'cause ad markets aren't as robust offshore compared to the U.S.?
Well, our topography is 50/50 outside of the U.S. and inside the U.S., and we've been pretty English-centric as a platform, right? So we're still at the beginning of the journey of having non-English communities and posts, and that's the discussion we had about machine translation, which I think is superhuman in terms of unlocking this for us. So there, our audience mix should be... I think, they can't, you know, if you look at our peers, they are more like 80/20, 80% outside of the U.S., 20% in North America.
Yeah
... something like that. And we have, I think, that potential. So that's part of the work we're doing, and that will then change the topography of our advertising business when the, because advertising follows the audience. So I think that would change it. So that is a massive, massive opportunity for us. And yeah.
Okay, so we have five minutes left. Any questions? I'm just going to give you the last question. So from the point of view of your experience with Wall Street to date, which is, you know, you guys have been public for 30 seconds, but what are the three key things you want Wall Street, that you think Wall Street is missing? I mean, I think there's some really clear messages about Reddit, but when you think about what you think Wall Street either myths, like you said, you brought up the word myths.
Uh-huh.
... myths that Wall Street still has about Reddit that are no longer correct, or things that you really want Wall Street to know that maybe we're missing, I would like you to sort of-
Yeah
... talk about those as a last question.
Okay. We have a couple. First is, I think there's been a little bit of a meme of: "You're almost 19 years old and you're not profitable. What is going on with the business?" And I think that that's just wholly a wrong line of thinking. Yes, we have been around for almost 19 years, but this recent era, we started building the advertising business about five years ago, and you just look at our P&L, you look at the structure of our business, our high gross margins, how we scale because of, you know, basically, it's just hosting text on the internet, and the leverage that we can get out of our model, I think that that's just a misleading headline, because you can see Q1, we already adjusted EBITDA positive.
We see a path to GAAP profitability that's on our radar. That's the next milestone. Like, you just look at this business, it is so advantaged structurally. So I think that that's wrong. That's a headline and a meme that's a little bit out there that, you know, I would say is, I think, misleading, if, if you dig underneath. The second is, I think, user growth, and there's been a lot of questions about: "Gosh, you've been around for 19 years, and your user growth has, you know, recently accelerated. Is it, is it sustainable? Like, how much headroom is there?" And you just heard about some of the opportunity there. Number one, our U.S. traffic is growing the fastest, and it's grown in many quarters.
From the fundamental work we've been doing on onboarding and ML and recommendations, that alone, in a mature market where we started 19 years ago, having that accelerated growth, I think is proof of the amount of headroom we have by doing good fundamental product work and how many more users can be on the platform. The TAM for Reddit is limitless. It, there's two friction points. One was the product in terms of onboarding and recommendations, which we've chipped away at, and you see our most mature market accelerate, and then language friction. So this issue around translating, being able to operate and start getting content and moderation going outside of English, which I talked about in terms of the AI translation.
So much headroom there, but again, that overhang of, "Gosh, why aren't you bigger after 19 years?" The third one I'll say is the ad business. You know, like, ad business, there's no doubt that it's a competitive business. It's tough. There is a duopoly that dominates a lot of the spend, but it is a huge market, and it is a market that will always take advantage of new propositions, and even though the market is growing single-digit percentages, it grows 10, 20 Reddits a year. It's just massive, and it's a great business. High gross margins and a business where it scales with users. And so I think we are much more... You know, sometimes people say, "Wow, it's so tough, it's so competitive.
“How do you chip away at share?” Well, the fact is, our proposition is so different from everybody else, and it's very rare that you get a consumer platform of this size and scale, with this deep an engagement, that has-- is so early in its ARPU and ad journey, and is so differentiated. So, you know, those are the three things that I think sometimes we, we hear, and frankly, I, I hear all three of them and I think, “Well, I'm very optimistic about all, all three of these.” Like, the, these are, I can- we can see the opportunity across all of these areas, so those are the three.
Fantastic. I think that's a great summary. I'm going to call it there. Thank you very much. You guys all have a 15-minute break, but Jen needs to run, so thank you very much for your time.