The inner workings of Reddit just became slightly less mysterious.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Reddit shared that 52 million people visit the site every day.
This is a stat called “daily active users” that other social media companies, including Facebook and Twitter, share in company updates. Previously, Reddit only shared its monthly active users (430 million, as of last year). It’s easy to see why: 52 million barely holds a candle to Facebook’s 1.82 billion.
Now, Reddit says it’s making this new metric available so it can be assessed more comparably with other platforms. That’s because the company is undertaking an advertising push. Reddit told the Journal it plans to increase advertising staff by 75 percent in 2021. If Reddit gets its way, you’ll see more ad campaigns in your favorite subreddits as Reddit attempts to travel the road to profitability.
That might not be so welcome among the website’s vocal and passionate user base. Those users have met changes, such as Reddit’s 2018 redesign, with strong pushback. Users and moderators also have a sometimes acrimonious relationship with the website. That’s a symptom of the fact that Reddit is a company owned by a media conglomerate, Conde Nast. But it’s also a community with a life of its own, run on the free labor of its most prolific users, the moderators. And those users feel a strong sense of ownership.
Reddit has also hosted toxic communities full of harmful speech or misinformation for years. It has taken steps to combat this, notably banning the pro-Trump r/The_Donald subreddit in June for breaking hate speech rules. However, it’ll have to do more if it wants advertisers to feel less squeamish about subjecting their ad placements to the content whims of a forum.