Social media platform Reddit saw its daily active users from international markets jump 44 percent year-on-year (YoY) to 45.7 million in the second quarter of 2024, driven by significant growth in India, France, the United Kingdom and the Philippines.
"...We're seeing good results with our growth strategies, including through machine translation," said Reddit CEO Steve Huffman during the company's earnings conference call on August 6.
The social media platform didn't disclose the country-wise breakdown of its user base or provide any specific information on its performance in international markets.
Reddit, which went public on the New York Stock Exchange in March, had previously stated that India is one of the key markets where the firm intends to focus on growing its user base, owing to its large internet population.
To accelerate its international expansion, Reddit is working on real-time machine translation of its content into multiple languages across the world.
The content is currently available in French, which resulted in France becoming one of its top three fastest-growing countries, surpassing growth in the United States in the quarter, the company said in a letter to shareholders.
Reddit said it will now expand this translation feature to Spanish, German, and Portuguese languages.
International expansion key driver in Q2
International expansion was a key driver for Reddit, both in terms of users and revenues during the quarter, Huffman said.
International markets account for about 50 percent of Reddit's overall daily active user base that stood at 91.2 million for the quarter, an increase of 51 percent YoY. The United States accounted for the remaining 45.5 million daily active users during the quarter, an increase of 59 percent YoY.
In the shareholder letter, Reddit said it had 342.3 million weekly active users during the quarter, registering a jump of 57 percent YoY.
"Looking ahead, we see substantial opportunities in enhancing search and expanding subreddit functionalities through our user economy," Huffman said.
He said that the company is witnessing rising adoption of custom posts, particularly in sports, which is one of the fastest-growing categories on the platform. This includes posts such as scoreboards and polls to drive traffic and engagement with the community. Reddit is now testing new interactive post types, including games to further boost engagement, Huffman said.
"Our developer platform, now in public beta, has a few hundred active developers...This year, we aim to enable monetization in the developer platform, empowering users to create and earn on the platform" he said.
Huffman said the company has also introduced several updates to the Ask Me Anything (AMA) feature, making it easier for a host to schedule and post and easier for users to participate. AMA is a type of text post where individuals invite users to ask them questions on any topic and answer them, usually in real-time.
"During the pilot, we've seen hundreds of new AMAs created, including those with high-profile brands and artists. These product updates tie into our advertising strategy, allowing us to test new conversation ad placements and AMA ads, which are high-intent services for brands and businesses to reach their audience" Huffman said during the earnings conference call.
New search formats
Reddit is also testing new search formats and keyword landing pages that use artificial intelligence (AI) to summarise and recommend content, helping users delve deeper into products, shows, and games on the platform, as per the shareholder letter.
During the quarter, the social media firm generated revenues of $281.2 million, registering a 54 percent jump YoY, the fastest yearly growth in two years.
This includes $253.1 million in advertising revenue, up 41 percent YoY, and $28.1 million in 'Other' revenue, a massive 690 percent jump YoY, primarily driven by new data licensing agreements signed in the first half of the year.
In recent months, Reddit has struck data licensing deals with companies such as Google and OpenAI, enabling them to access the platform's content to train their respective AI models.
"This market is still evolving, and we are exploring agreements of partners across the landscape who are aligned with our public content and user privacy policies and where there is commercial alignment" Huffman said during the call.
He said the company is seeing an evolution in the search ecosystem where Internet search, summarisation and training are blending, hence it is seeking a right balance between openness and protecting its users and platform.
"Our preference is for Reddit to be open and indexed in third-party search, and we are in discussions with both big and small search engines towards this end. However, some players in the ecosystem have not been transparent with their use of Reddit's content and in those instances, we've blocked access to protect Reddit content and user privacy" Huffman said.
Last month, Reddit changed its policy to block search engines that do not have commercial agreements with the social media firm, including Microsoft's Bing, from accessing the site's posts and comments.
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