Reddit, the industry’s newest oldest social media darling (seriously, did you know Reddit is legally able to drink as of this summer?), wants advertisers to know it is here for ALL brands.
And I think marketers need to start believing them.
For a long time, Reddit occupied a pretty specific place in the media plan. It was somewhere you went to reach gamers, IT decision makers, or integrate into a particular corner of internet culture. Maybe you carved out some incremental test budget. Maybe it played an upper-funnel role. But it still felt a little Wild West, the controls weren’t quite there, and no one really knew what success was supposed to look like.
That’s changing quickly.
Reddit has been steadily building out the things advertisers expect from a mature ad platform: new bidding structures, lead gen, age targeting, verified profiles, and a list of other updates too long to get into here (and I say that as someone with a tendency towards the verbose).
But I’d argue Reddit doesn’t actually need to become a full-funnel platform. Its users already treat it like one.
The funnel was there before the ad products were
Think about how you actually use Reddit. Users go there for recommendations and validation on just about everything. Personally, I’ve used Reddit before buying skincare products, planning a trip, and purchasing a robot litter box. I’ve discovered products there, gone back while considering whether they were worth buying, and ultimately made purchases based on what I found.
That behavior is happening whether an advertiser is involved or not.
And it goes far beyond the audiences marketers traditionally associate with the platform. We still hear “ITDM” and immediately think Reddit. Which, yes. But moms are there. Pet owners are there. Entertainment and news junkies are there. These are deeply engaged communities talking about the things they care about, which gives brands an opportunity to be far more tailored and personal than the old perception of Reddit would suggest.
If you don’t think your audience is on Reddit, I’ve got news for you. They probably are.
What I’m interested in is whether Reddit can harness all of that existing intent into an ad platform without disrupting the behavior that made it so valuable in the first place.
The advertising infrastructure is catching up
Twelve to eighteen months ago, I would have been much more likely to give Reddit incremental test budget or an upper-funnel role.
Today, as long as there’s a good measurement framework behind it, I think Reddit can live just about anywhere in the funnel for just about any advertiser.
The recent product updates are a big reason why.
New bidding structures give advertisers more control over what they’re optimizing toward. Lead gen creates a clean path for brands with direct-response objectives. Age targeting opens the platform to advertisers that need more precision around who they reach. Early tests of Reddit’s newer bidding structures have also shown a 15% reduction in CPA.
None of these sound particularly revolutionary in isolation. Meta has them. TikTok has them. That’s exactly the point.
Reddit is laying the pipes advertisers need to treat it like a serious performance platform rather than an interesting experimental line on the media plan.
But becoming more like Meta isn’t necessarily the goal
There are still things Reddit needs to figure out.
Part of why Meta and TikTok work so well for advertisers is that they’re inherently visual environments. Reddit is moving in that direction, but it remains largely text-based. Text-based native ads may not feel particularly obtrusive or annoying, but they’re also very easy to overlook. I still have questions about how effective that becomes as advertisers ask Reddit to do more of the heavy lifting further down the funnel.
And then there’s the bigger challenge. People use Reddit because it feels like Reddit. You can find someone who has already bought the product you’re considering, visited the hotel you’re looking at, dealt with the exact problem you’re trying to solve, or has extremely strong feelings about the robot litter box sitting in your cart. That authenticity is the product.
So as Reddit builds better attribution, more sophisticated bidding and targeting, and more ways for advertisers to participate, it has to do it without scaring off the people creating all of that valuable intent in the first place.
That’s a difficult balance. But the opportunity is already there.
