The Rise of Reddit

It was recently announced that Reddit had overtaken TikTok as the fourth-most-used social media service in the UK.

A report from Ofcom states that Reddit has achieved double-digit year-on-year growth, having risen 28% in monthly audience figures between May 2024 and May 2025. 2025 was the second year in a row in which it had seen such significant growth, and by the end of the year it was estimated to be reaching 60% of UK internet users.

Reddit is not a new phenomenon, having been founded in June 2005 by two American roommates, web developer Steve Huffman and internet entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian, who were also later joined by American computer programmer Aaron Swartz (1986-2013). So what explains the recent growth of the network?

Created first and foremost as a forum-based social media platform, Reddit differentiated itself from typical social media sites. Once seen as more of a niche option centred upon conversations on specific topics and areas of interest, Reddit is now regarded as significantly more mainstream, its recent growth being partly attributed to an increase in internet users seeking more authentic, real conversations.

At a time when AI large-language models are devising seemingly perfectly-formed answers to user questions and prompts, perhaps this increase in the use of Reddit shows a hunger for more 'human' answers - ones that reflect lived human experience, with the debates, arguments, emotions and different points of view that reflect that.

Reddit offers raw, unvarnished comments and answers; and the anonymity it offers to users seems to leave people generally more inclined to share real experiences, as opposed to the tightly-selected highlights reel that you would tend to see shared on social media platforms that personally identify users, where friends, family and employers might reasonably be expected to be watching.

So, what exactly is Reddit?

If you haven’t been accessing Reddit during its recent period of massive growth, you may perhaps be unfamiliar with the way it works. Let us break it down.

Like other social platforms, Reddit lets users create posts. These may be text-based, or take the form of images, videos or links. These posts can be published within themed conversations and discussions called 'subreddits'. You can also post to a personal profile, but posting into a subreddit allows for more visibility, as your post will appear in that community’s feed and so will get in front of a self-selected group of people with an avowed interest in that particular topic.

Other users are then free to comment on each post and engage in discussion. Posts can also be upvoted or downvoted to signal whether each user who chooses to vote likes or dislikes them. The more upvotes a post receives, the more visible it will be on the site. Likewise, if a post receives more downvotes than upvotes, it will become less visible.

You can join subreddits once you have created an account on Reddit. Posts from these subreddits will then appear in your feed. If you use the site without creating an account, the site's most popular posts across a range of subreddits will be displayed in your feed, leaving the topics you get to see a matter of pot luck. So creating an account has clear advantages in terms of personalisation and the relevance of the content displayed to you.

Users can also create their own new subreddits. Doing this makes you the owner (or overall moderator) of whichever subreddits you have set up. You will be expected to abide by Reddit’s own content rules and policies, but are also at liberty, within these overarching guidelnes, to set your own rules specific to the subreddit concerned. As the owner of a subreddit, you can further appoint other moderators to the subreddit to help manage its content. Both owners and moderators of subreddits manage them on a voluntary rather than paid basis, which helps to give many of them an authentic, grassroots feel. You will generally tend to find that a relevant subreddit already exists on almost any given topic under the sun, but there is nothing to stop you adding your own spin on that topic within your own subreddit.

Image created using ChatGPT.

The history of Reddit

Founded in 2005, Reddit launched with funding support from Y Combinator, a start-up incubator run by English-American computer scientist and entrepreneur Paul Graham. Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian had attended a lecture given in Boston by Graham, who invited them to apply for the incubator during a discussion that followed.

When the site first launched, the founders felt the initial need to create a number of fake users that they used to publish posts from, in order to give the impression of pre-existing activity and popularity that would then attract more real users. In November 2005, American Businessman Christopher Slowe joined the company. Shortly afterwards,between late 2005 and early 2006, Aaron Swartz’s company Infogami was merged with Reddit.

After Swartz joined the team, he helped to rewrite the software used to run Reddit. He had previously created a web framework, web.py, which was thought to be a better fit for Reddit, owing to its simplicity and performance, than Lisp, the software that Reddit was using at the time.

On 31 October 2006, Huffman and Ohanian completed the sale of Reddit to Condé Nast Publications, at which point the team relocated to San Francisco.

In January 2007, Swartz was asked to leave the business for unknown reasons. He believed it may have been because of his expressing his dislike of the new office environment.

Huffman and Ohanian themselves left Reddit in 2009 to work on other companies, less than four years after founding it. Erik Martin became community manager around this time, later rising to the position of general manager in 2011. American engineer and entrepreneur Yishan Wong, who had joined the company while Ohanian was still there and was credited by him for growing Reddit’s user base substantially, was later appointed as CEO, in which role he served from 2012 – 2014. Over this period, users grew from 35 million to 174 million.

Ellen Pao, an American lawyer and businesswoman, replaced Wong in 2014, but left Reddit shortly afterwards, in 2015. At this point, the two founders (Huffman and Ohanian) unexpectedly rejoined the company as CEO and Executive Chairman. Many changes and updates were made following their return, such as the launching of Reddit apps for both iOS and Android, and an overhaul of the website in 2018.

Reddit went public on the New York Stock Exchange on 21^st March 2024, offering shares at an initial price of $47 each. The price climbed slightly on their first day trading, to $50.44 per share, which proved to be a good sign of their future performance, as less than two years later, the current share price stands at $244.02 (correct as of 13^th January 2026), a fivefold improvement on the launch price.

Image created using ChatGPT.

The future of Reddit

Given the significant recent growth of the platform, and its frequent featuring as a trusted source by ChatGPT, Reddit currently looks to have an assured bright future.

The company has taken steps to strengthen its position within the AI search landscape, notably by obtaining content partnerships with OpenAI, reportedly worth $70 million a year, and Google, reportedly to the value of $60 million a year, aimed at ensuring that conversations on Reddit are fed back into AI tools, and are referenced in answers to relevant questions.

Through these partnerships, both Open AI and Google have access to the Reddit Data API, which means that both can access real-time information and discussions taking place within Reddit and use them within their respective answer engines, such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini, as well as in other tools.

Giving privileged and easy access to these generative answer engines and allowing them train on its content ensures excellent visibility for Reddit among AI chatbot users. This has helped to offset the well-documented negative impact that generative search and AI answer engines have been having on organic traffic from Google and other conventional sources of website discovery, as well as making Reddit a go-to site for marketers who wish to increase their 'reach' in AI answers.

And this strategy looks to be working very well. In June 2025, Profound reported that www.reddit.com was the most cited domain on Google AI Overviews and Perplexity; and that September, Ahrefs reported that www.reddit.com was the most cited domain on ChatGPT globally.

This type of content partnership may be the future of how AI operators will work with content publishers in order to back off and cite original human-generated content. Many publications are unhappy with AI answer engines training on their content, for fear of that content being reproduced without proper attribution, and the value of their original work being diminished. The success of Reddit's partnership shows that those fears are perhaps not entirely well-founded.

These partnerships also allow Reddit to utilise the AI-powered features and offerings from both companies in order better to serve their community and provide an improved user experience.

While Reddit is working with some of the leading AI companies through agreed partnerships, it still believes in the protection of original content. In September 2025, Reddit backed Really Simple Licensing (RSL), an open content licensing standard that enables content publishers and publications to define their own terms for how data may be used and should be compensated by AI crawlers.

With its high level of visibility on some of the leading AI answer platforms, we do think that Reddit will be more vulnerable to spamming. Just as businesses have often adopted an SEO-oriented practice of posting backlinks to their websites into forums for self-promotion, we may start to see this kind of activity within a tailored selection of relevant subreddits, in the hope of being cited within an AI generated answer.

Reddit already contends with a fair number of bots and a fair amount of spamming owing to the Contributor Programme, which was introduced in 2023. This programme is essentially a way for users to make money from the platform through the amount of 'karma' and the number of awards received on posts and comments. Monetising the platform in this way has encouraged increased posts from bot accounts as a way of artificially farming fake karma from seeming users in order to exchange it for money.

We’ll be interested to see if there is an increase in marketing and spam activity on the site in future, and how Reddit and the subreddit owners and moderators will respond to and manage this if so.

Conclusion

The recent growth of Reddit mainly comes down to two things. Firstly, with the emergence of and rapid advancements within generative search and answer engines, users nowadays have access to a refined, polished response to nearly all their queries. While in many cases this is exactly what the user wants, it may not satisfy their needs when they are looking for a human point of view or an answer from personal experience.

In some cases, users will want to do more research and read or listen to real first-hand experiences and recommendations in order to resolve their queries. That is exactly what Reddit offers, with its unfiltered conversations and discussions from real people.

Secondly, the company has taken a forward-thinking approach by recognising and leveraging the power subsisting in its content and negotiating partnerships with two of the biggest AI LLM operators. While some sites and content publishers have shied away from what seems to be becoming the new norm and have taken a stand against these AI companies in order to protect their content, Reddit has instead stepped forward to embrace third-party generative AI, seemingly calculating that this would be the best and most lucrative option for them. In this way, they have ensured that their content has value in the changing digital landscape.

While the long-term results of their aforementioned policies remain to be seen, Reddit looks to be leading the way here - we think this kind of content partnership or licensing deal will be the way in which more and more publishers and creators of size will work with AI companies in the future, in order to protect their rights and the value of their content while ensuring that they maintain visibility.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on Reddit, whether or not you use it, and whether you plan to use it in future. Get in touch here.

Please note our banner image for this article was created using Google Gemini.