Reddit shares daily active user figures for the first time

What just happened? Reddit has for the first time publicly shared daily active user numbers, a metric commonly used by social media companies to delineate audience size. So, just how active is the self-proclaimed “front page of the Internet?”

Reddit averaged 52 million daily active users in October, which is an increase of 33 percent from the same period in 2019, per the WSJ report. For comparison, Facebook’s average daily active user count in the month of September was 1.82 billion. Twitter, meanwhile, reported 187 million monetizable daily active users during its most recent quarter.

Jen Wong, chief operating officer at Reddit, told The Journal that they decided to share user information as a more accurate reflection of their user growth and to better fall in line with industry reporting.

Being more transparent could also help Reddit secure more advertising deals. Like many companies, Reddit saw growth in its advertising business slow during the first part of 2020 due to the ongoing pandemic. Fortunately for them, it has since rebounded.

Despite being around for over 15 years now, Reddit is still classified as an “experimental” category for many advertisers, said Susan Schiekofer, chief digital investment officer for ad-buying giant GroupM.

“If we are comparing them to the big ones—Snap, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram—they are not anywhere near that scale,” Schiekofer said. “But the upside for them is really big,” she added.

Image credit: Devina Saputri, chrisdorney