Reddit’s latest earnings are in, and surprise: it is not just cat memes paying the bills anymore. The company’s second-quarter results show it’s leaning hard into two things: ads and AI. (Yes, Reddit is now a tech company with a business plan.)
Ads still pay the rent, $465 million worth, making up 93% of Reddit’s revenue. And to make those ads smarter (and more lucrative), Reddit rolled out some AI-powered marketing goodies just last month.
One of them is Reddit Insights, a crystal ball built on billions of posts and comments. It helps advertisers spot trends and track what Redditors are ranting (or raving) about in real time. Then there is the Conversation Summary Add-on, which lets brands feature actual Reddit discussions in their ads. Think: “Here’s what people are saying about your shampoo, and no, it’s not just your marketing team.”
Related: Reddit to Unify Search Interface in Push to Become a Full-Fledged Search Engine
In a slightly more behind-the-scenes move, Reddit also made $35 million from what it calls “other revenue.” Translation: selling access to its data to AI companies. That’s a 24% jump from last year, and it’s mostly thanks to deals with OpenAI and Google, who are feeding Reddit threads into their large language models like it’s brain food.
Reddit’s also doing its own AI homework. Back in December, it launched Reddit Answers, a chat-style feature that pulls answers from Reddit content in a conversational format. It’s like asking Reddit a question and getting a coherent answer instead of a chaotic thread.
That tool now has 6 million weekly users, up from 1 million last quarter. And Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says it’s just getting started. The plan is to bake Reddit Answers more deeply into search, making search less of an afterthought and more of the main event.
Reddit’s finally acting like a company that wants to stay public, not just a forum where internet dwellers yell into the void.
The AI strategy? Dual-purpose:
- Make ads smarter and easier to target
- Sell Reddit data to AI giants who need human-like content for training
The result? A platform that’s turning commentary into capital. Reddit figured out how to monetize the chaos: Let AI read it, sell it, and respond to it. Now the real question is: If Reddit becomes an AI training ground and an AI tool itself, who is doing the talking, humans or the machines they trained?
