Driving the news: In an interview Thursday, Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman said the company was making the change to improve its user experience, strengthen its advertising business and prevent bots from scraping its proprietary data.
- Chief Operating Officer Jen Wong told Axios that the move does not represent a change in strategy, as the company has always focused on creating a direct destination.
- “It’s just that over the last 10 years, because our corpus (of data) was open, we got a lot of search traffic, so that became part of the equation,” but that didn’t change the company’s mission.
Zoom: Huffman expressed confidence that the change would ultimately improve engagement and monetization, even as changes to traditional search continue to impact user growth in the United States.
- “When users log in, they spend more time on Reddit, and we can learn more about their interests, so we can better target ads,” he said.
- He also noted that near-term risk is limited because “the vast majority of engagement and over 80% of our monetization comes from our app and logged in users.”
- In a letter to shareholders, Reddit acknowledged that search SEO traffic had “decreased significantly in the third quarter” and said daily users could decline by a “low double-digit percentage” in the fourth quarter if search SEO trends persist.
How it works: Reddit will begin testing the full login experience this quarter outside the US and collect data on the best approach before gradually rolling out broader changes.
- Logged in users can get personalized content, feeds, and recommended communities based on their activity and interests, although they can opt out of personalization.
- The company is still working on what content will be available to users who don’t log in. Participation features, such as comments and content ratings, will continue to be accessible only to logged in users.
- Its home page will still be accessible to logged out visitors. People accessing the platform through search engines or shared links will still be able to see this linked content.
- Huffman said the company will monitor the conversion rate of logged in users as a measure of success.
Between the lines: Reddit has long prioritized user privacy and supported user anonymity as a way to encourage authentic expression.
- Logged in users will not be required to reveal their real name or identity, the company said.
- The company is relaunching its incognito browsing mode within its app, which allows users to browse and search without affecting their connected accounts.
- But the platform will be read-only in incognito mode, meaning users won’t be able to comment or engage.
Follow the money: The changes will place user personalization more central to the Reddit experience, which Wong says will strengthen the company’s advertising business.
- The engagement of logged-in users is about five times higher than that of logged-out users, Wong said. “They see more impressions and therefore generate more business results for advertisers,” she noted.
- Performance advertising, which now accounts for more than 60% of Reddit’s ad revenue, is the fastest-growing part of the company’s business.
Reality check: Most other major consumer Internet platforms have already made this move.
- Huffman said he personally resisted the changes because of his belief in the open Internet.
- It ultimately arrived because Reddit’s scale made personalization more important to today’s users and because protecting the platform’s content from unauthorized scraping became more urgent.
- The company said most of its unauthorized scrapings involve content that lies outside of the login experience on the open web.
The big picture: The change was announced alongside Reddit’s third-quarter results, which saw advertising activity grow 54% year-over-year.
- The company beat Wall Street estimates for revenue and profit growth, but fell short of expectations for U.S. user growth amid weakening search traffic.
- Since its IPO in March 2024, Reddit’s advertising business has nearly tripled. The company generated $222.7 million in advertising revenue in the first quarter of 2024, compared to $847 million in the third quarter of this year. The vast majority of Reddit’s revenue (94.7%) comes from ads.
Zoom out: Reddit believes its content will become more valuable in the AI age, as people seek authentic human recommendations and content to validate information from chatbots.
- “We are an extremely broad and new set of human experiences and preferences, and I don’t think there is anything comparable,” Wong said.
- In the third quarter, Reddit had more than 27 billion posts and comments, an unprecedented trove of human data.
Reddit will still have a license its content to third parties and relies on these agreements to set fair conditions for scraping and use of the content.
- In its earnings release, the company said non-advertising revenue, which includes data licensing, totaled $48 million in the third quarter, up 35% year over year.
What to watch: The move to logged in users will help Reddit be more intentional about third-party access to its data.
- Huffman explained that how data is used and displayed on other platforms can impact the core Reddit experience.
- Reddit announced an expanded partnership with Google in 2024, worth $60 million per year. It announced a similar deal with OpenAI later that year.
- The company sued Anthropic and Perplexity in 2025 for unauthorized scraping.
The bottom line: Huffman said this change is not a response to Google Search changes, but rather “a desire to create the best version of Reddit.”
- In five years, “I want Reddit to be more Reddit,” he remarked, saying he hopes the changes will help users lean into the platform’s core experiences, like intentional communities and higher or lower ranking content.
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