The Reddit User Economy & Search is Coming

Welcome to this week’s edition of ReddVisible.

See what you missed from the last edition:

Alright, let’s jump right in to this week’s Reddit headlines….

First, the BIG one!

Reddit Debuts a Search Product

Back in August I saw Reddit making moves towards more formally entering the battle for search. Now it appears that day has arrived:

And here’s the link to the formal announcement: https://redditinc.com/blog/introducing-reddit-answers

This could be a pivotal moment that we look back on in hindsight. I’m watching the following next moves:

• How does Reddit Answers compare to legacy search (e.g. Google)?

• How does Reddit Answers compare to AI-first search (e.g. ChatGPT)?

• How does Google specifically respond? Especially in light of their nascent data insights deal with Reddit.

• How quickly and effectively does Reddit monetize Reddit Answers as an ad product?

The Coming Reddit User Economy

I attended “Mod World” this past weekend, the annual gathering for Reddit moderators. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman started things off with a no-holds-barred “AMA” (in true Reddit style).

He covered a fair bit of ground, like pointed questions on how the company has handled moderator protests and spam, BUT the big lede for me was the repeated references to the upcoming Reddit “user economy”.

Given Reddit’s continued and persistent ascendence, this is something brands and creators must tune into heading into 2025.

Reddit famously relies on the good vibes (and free labor) of users and moderators to sustain their community-led growth strategy. As Reddit’s digital visibility continues to grow, this creates a few problems:

1. Moderators are overwhelmed with mod activities (community management, engagement, spam, and governance). Talk about a full-time hobby.

2. Massive and rapid exponential growth in the last year means there are long-tail gaps and content that needs to be created, more than ever, if Reddit is to fully satisfy search-based and on-platform content consumers.

3. Reddit doesn’t have any platform-sanctioned ways for users OR moderators to derive economic value from their (now quite valuable) content and communities.

Now this is my assessment (not Steve’s), but I suspect they are acutely aware of the lack of monetization options. They are no TikTok when it comes to user economy!

I first heard rumblings of their monetization ideas on their Q3 earnings call, but this weekend it was on full bore as something they are urgently working on.

Some nuggets I gleaned were comments like “user economy”, “private sub-subreddits”, “users and mods can make money on Reddit”.

What I think is coming:

• A Substack-like membership model

• The ability to create private sub-communities within a subreddit (possibly tied to this model).

While this wasn’t specifically mentioned, I do think some sort of ad-based rev share model would be fairly easy to implement and align with their paid ads product.

This would also be the right thing to do, ethically, IMO.

Regardless of the specifics, I expect Reddit to increasingly roll out monetization features in 2025. Fast forward 1-2 years and we could see the explosion of the creator-driven cottage industry, similar to how TikTok has evolved.

This Week in Reddit

Here are some of the top stories about Reddit this week:

• Reddit Gains More Commercial Intent Coverage: Glen Allsopp has an excellent overview of how much Reddit has gained in the Google search landscape, just in the last Quarter (and on top of insane YoY growth).

Reddit Software & Tools

The Reddit ecosystem for tools, software, and related apps is particularly underdeveloped for the #3 platform in the world.

I’m tracking the new tools that pop on my radar here:

• NotifyGPT: Not specifically a Reddit tool, but Reddit is one of it’s strongest use cases for social listening.

• KWatch.io: An all source UGC social listening and monitoring platform, includes Reddit.

• GummySearch: The first dedicated Reddit intel suite I’ve seen, great for monitoring communities, tracking keywords, and doing more advanced keyword research.

• Karmalyzer: I’m an early user of this “Reddit health” app. Still early, but I love the concept of monitoring this.

• RedditInsights.ai: Found this one, a good way to group and approximate topic interest from Reddit. A super scraper. '

• Pulse: This ones new this week and I haven’t tested it too much, but could be an interesting. More positioned to brands marketing on Reddit (connects via Reddit API).

• Subreddit Traffic Tracker: This is an interesting new find that helps optimize post and engagement timing based on when specific communities are most active on Reddit.

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That’s it for this week!