Reddit (now a publicly traded company and subject to greater scrutiny of its revenue growth) has placed a big emphasis on growing its audience around the world, especially in French-speaking countries. CEO Steve Huffman acknowledged during his first earnings call that the company is currently working on automatically translating site content into French in real time, thanks to advances in language models at scale. .
He also mentioned expanding the ecosystem with some U-turns. The company hopes to woo developers with new tools, which is surprising given its history in this space. And the company plans to reintroduce Reddit Gold. This is also surprising considering the company discontinued its cryptocurrency efforts less than a year ago.
Moves like this predict what the future will be like for Reddit, not the present. Today, the news is relatively encouraging, as his Reddit revenue last quarter was up 48% year-over-year to $243 million, and his unique user count was up 37% to $82.7 million. I did. (This number includes both logged in and logged out users, and is the number that counted viewers when Twitter (now called X) was public.) )
User growth and translation
Huffman said on the earnings call that half of Reddit's audience is based in the U.S., noting that the company is focusing more on ways to increase its international footprint.
“We're still 50/50 U.S. to non-U.S., whereas our peers are 80% to 90% or more non-U.S.,” he said. “I think there's a huge opportunity there.” He went on to describe AI-powered automatic translation as “one of the things that opens up a lot of potential for us in the short to medium term.”
“So we are now translating our entire corpus, which is mostly in English, into other languages, and we hope that will help accelerate our international growth,” he said.
He says the site-wide translation process is still in the testing phase, but a lot of resources are being put into it. Huffman said the content is also indexed in his Google search results in French, driving traffic to the site, and the company wants to move into Spanish next.
Reddit has been offering post-based translations since last year, supporting eight languages.
developer tools
It was incredible to hear Mr. Huffman talk about developer tools on the conference call. It was in July 2023 that the company found itself embroiled in a major feud with a third-party client developer over changes to his API. As a result, hundreds of subreddits were blacked out in protest of the API changes.
The social network is currently in PlayNice mode. Huffman said there are plans for tools that will “push the boundaries of subreddits.” He cited examples of ongoing experiments such as live scores on some sports subreddits and live stock tickers on r/wallstreetbets, a subreddit known for its GameStop stock story.
He said hundreds of developers are already testing these new experiences. Reddit aims to add more developers from its waiting list this summer and enable monetization features by the end of the year.
Other announcements
Earlier this year, Reddit signed a deal with Google that would allow the search engine company to use the social network's data. In response to questions from the Reddit community, Huffman said the company plans to license the data to other companies as well. This is a big issue and is often controversial given the fact that users may not want their data to be used for example for AI training or other common purposes these days. I am. Unsurprisingly, Huffman insisted that, as you might expect, the company is “careful and selective” in choosing its partners.
The immediate challenge for the company is to further build out its revenue generation infrastructure. As such, Gold and another currency initiative, blockchain-based Community Points, were both canceled last year, but will be aired again on the platform as crypto presents an opportunity for Reddit to diversify its business model. That's going to happen. The company said in its earnings call that it plans to launch an “improved” Gold product with programs for users to spend and earn money on the platform.
Last month, Reddit CPO Pali Bhat mentioned some of these new initiatives in an interview with TechCrunch, and the company is now making moves to capitalize on these growth levers.