As Reddit surpasses half a billion weekly active users, its latest earnings call makes the case that AI will increase the value of real community discussion.
The company announced its plans to invest in automation to improve relevance, safety and advertising outcomes while protecting the conversations, first-hand experiences and debate that distinguish its platform.
CX leaders should recognise the limits of customer experiences built around frictionless but impersonal content, rather than assuming convenience alone will create trust.
Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, said the company believes authentic community interaction will become increasingly valuable as the internet becomes more automated.
“As the internet becomes more automated, the value of authentic human conversation continues to rise.”
“As the internet becomes flooded with synthetic content, people are craving real human perspective. We are the antidote to an automated web.”
Reddit Max Makes Relevance More Valuable
In its previous quarter, Reddit demonstrated how AI is reshaping the quality, relevance, and trustworthiness of its CX across the platform, implementing machine learning to improve the customer journey and advertising performance for increased value.
The rapid growth of Reddit Max saw success with this approach as its AI-powered advertising suite grew more than 60% QoQ, achieving a revenue increase of over 150%, helping advertisers reach users in line with the intent and context of Reddit’s communities.
By enabling AI to improve relevance rather than simply automate processes, Reddit also introduced Dual Attribution in the previous quarter, giving advertisers clearer evidence of business impact and enabling AI to build a better understanding of how communities influence purchasing decisions.
Jen Wong, Chief Operating Officer at Reddit, explained how the company is using combined measurement signals to strengthen its advertising technology and deliver better outcomes for marketers.
“With dual attribution, we combine our first-party attribution signals with existing mobile measurement partner signals to improve our ML models, campaign optimization, and advertiser outcomes,” she said.
Reddit users and advertisers are now seeing AI being used to not only personalize experiences, but also to improve the quality of the data that organizations use to evaluate customer engagement and marketing effectiveness.
For its users in particular, Reddit has applied LLMs in moderation to help new customers become active contributors whilst limiting the amount of spam and malicious behavior.
In fact, the company reported success in Q2 by blocking 23 million spam views per day before they reached a human user, yet user exposure to spam only fell by 20% from January to March 2026.
In order to solve this, AI is being implemented to support healthier discussions by reducing friction for legitimate participation whilst improving the platform’s defences against abuse.
Huffman explained:
“Using LLM-assisted moderation, we can help bring in the prospective great user and continually get better at keeping the spammers and other bad behaviors out.”
However, its current feed models only capture around 10% of user activity, limiting their ability to reflect fast-moving conversations.
To tackle this, Reddit has announced it is rebuilding these systems to create more timely and personalized recommendations, aiming to create safer participation, stronger trust, and more meaningful insights for advertisers.
Reddit Reaches 500 Million Weekly Users
Despite much of Q2 focusing on AI, the company emphasized that its long-term competitive advantage is human-centered, as authentic discussions will likely become increasingly valuable in the age of generative AI.
Since AI cannot yet easily replicate lived experiences and personal opinions, Reddit is repositioning itself as a core hub for millions of users to collectively answer questions, debate ideas, and share first-hand experiences.
“As the internet becomes more automated, the value of authentic human conversation continues to rise,” Huffman notes.
Reddit’s responsibility to provide these human-centered services have never been more pressing, as the company now reports seeing half a billion weekly active users and over 130 million daily active users.
These users are reportedly generating a total of 26 billion posts and comments across the platform, adding another one billion in the previous quarter alone.
Rather than measuring success solely through audience growth, Reddit is emphasizing participation, demonstrating that users are not simply consuming content but actively contributing to conversations.
“The social media platforms are for the 1% of creators, and Reddit is for everybody else,” he continued.
Supporting this vision, Reddit has redesigned post composer across mobile and web with a new comment composer and continuing to improve community recommendations to help users discover relevant discussions more quickly.
These investments have improved new user retention, increasing by 50% YoY on a relative basis and more than 10% of video posts now being created through Reddit’s video-and-comments experience.
Underlying these product investments is Reddit’s belief that AI is changing what users value online. Rather than competing to summarize information, Reddit argues that its greatest strength lies in preserving the conversations behind it. Huffman observed that
“AI compresses the internet into summaries,” Huffman explained.
“Reddit delivers the opposite: deep discussions, passionate debates, and lived experiences. People don’t want a summary of Reddit, they want Reddit.”
Today, as AI makes information more abundant, trust becomes a scarce resource as more consumers become skeptical of content that appears polished, generated, or commercially motivated.
Even content that unintentionally falls into one or more of these categories can prompt users to seek context through conversations with real people who have no incentive beyond sharing their own experiences.
For CX leaders, the quality of customer communities and peer-to-peer engagement may become a more significant differentiator when making buying decisions, shaping trust, influencing purchase decisions, and strengthening long-term customer loyalty.
Active Advertisers Rise More Than 70%
Reddit’s Q2 commercial strategy focused on turning the intent generated within its communities into measurable outcomes for advertisers, reporting an advertising revenue of 64% YoY increase.
Furthermore, with active advertisers increasing by more than 70%, Reddit has managed to double its mid-market and SMB customers over the same period by investing in tools, integrations, and measurement capabilities needed to compete for larger, performance-driven marketing budgets.
“Our strategy is to make businesses of all sizes successful on Reddit by delivering market-competitive outcomes across objectives,” said Wong.
This strategy also included reducing the effort required for brands to launch and optimize campaigns, as Reddit Max’s Tailored Creatives capability uses AI to identify the most relevant communities and audiences before generating creative variations from existing assets.
By adapting messaging to match community context, this can help marketers improve efficiency, reportedly reducing cost per action by roughly 15% while increasing results volume by 28%, demonstrates how AI is moving beyond audience targeting to streamline campaign creation while improving relevance.
Looking into Q3, Reddit will be making it easier for merchants to advertise after integrating Shopify in May, having already surpassed 500 integrated merchant accounts.
“We’ll be doing some joint marketing efforts to accelerate the acquisition now that we have the capability to sync in catalog and have CAPI integrated into Shopify automatically from Shopify merchants,” Wong announced.
“We’re making it easier for them to stay always on with more credit line adoption and taking friction out of working across the funnel.”
Last quarter, Reddit saw a 1.5 times higher return on ad spend for consumer package goods after introducing Shopping Listing Ads in alpha, increasing shopping conversations by 40% across the platform.
Advertising investments in Q2 showed Reddit evolving into a more connected, measurable, and commerce-focused marketing platform, preserving its community discussions that differentiate from traditional social media.
Reddit Key Earnings Results
Reddit’s Q2 performance signalled accelerating commercial momentum, driven by expanding advertiser demand and the growing effectiveness of its performance, automation and commerce offerings.
- Total revenue reached $805MN, up 61% YoY
- Advertising revenue increased to $762MN, up 64% YoY
- The company saw weekly active users increase by over 500MN, along with daily active users increasing past 130MN
- Video advertising revenue more than doubled YoY
