There's nobody better to talk about that than Steve. Steve is the co-founder of Reddit. He's been with the company for a very long time and he was one who took it public and has made it what it is today. So, without further ado, please give a warm welcome to Steve Huffman.
Steve and I just did this a few weeks ago, so I feel like we're prepped. We know what's going on. Steve, you guys just made some announcements about some new updates heading into Cannes. What are you most excited about for the marketers here like that's new on Reddit that they should be thinking about taking advantage of?
Oh, there's lots of movement. Lots of movement all over the Reddit ad stack. So, we've got Reddit Max, which is the new automated buying system. We've got new shopping ads. We've got our Shopify integration, which allows stores to integrate quickly into Reddit. We've got all sorts of great new insight tools to see what people are saying about your brand, about your competitors, all these things. So it's really become, you know, Reddit can be a one-stop shop or a full funnel solution. It's all the way from what's my next hobby to consideration all the way down to purchase. We work great for brand and performance. And so, yeah, it's all there. It's a nice, growing, I think, ecosystem that we're building.
You are pitching brands that Reddit is the authentic place to show up. But at the same time, because Reddit is a place where people can authentically be themselves, sometimes people don't necessarily have positive things to say about brands. Like, how do you balance making sure that they can leverage the opportunity of Reddit, but also not surround themselves with something that's possibly negative about their brand?
So, this kind of two ways I can answer this question. So, one is if this were a brand safety question, like where does my brand appear or where do ads appear? Look, we're in the we want happy customers business, right? Not in the we put your ads where you don't want to be business. And so, that's pretty straightforward, right? You'll show up wherever you want to be or not. We're talking more generally, and this is a conversation I have a lot with brands. They say, 'Hey, my brand is on Reddit. Um maybe there's a subreddit dedicated to my company or my product. I don't I'm not a part of that. Like, what what what should I do?' Um that's a question that comes up almost basically every CEO I meet at any conference raises that to me. And so, there's a couple of ways we handle that. So, one, we say, 'Look, the best way to to use Reddit, whether you're using it formally as an advertiser or you want to have an organic presence, is you have to understand Reddit. Like, you have to actually use it because on the surface it looks like social media, but it's not social media. And the the communities on Reddit are actual communities run by actual people. Um and so, there's a certainly a way to be involved, um but it requires respect and some finesse.' Um but we've got teams, you know, we've got teams who can help you on the ad side. We've got a new brand success team that can help you just kind of make the relationship with the subreddit that exists, help you build your professional presence on Reddit. But I I'll draw your attention to one of my favorite campaigns of the last year. In fact, I think they're up for an award this year. This is the Dove campaign. So, uh we've had a long relationship with Dove, and they decided to do this campaign on Reddit where they made a post promoting a new product of theirs, and they said, 'Uh we want to hear your feedback on this product. We'll take the top 100 comments, good or bad, and we'll put them in our real creatives.' And so, and then they did that. And so, most of the feedback was pretty good, um but not all of it was. But then they took all of the everything the user said, good, bad, ugly, and then put it on their creatives that they used off-platform. And it ended up going extremely well. Like I said, they're up for an award. Because what it did is by showing the criticism, it validated the the promoters. It gave so much credibility to everything else they were saying. And so, I think they being willing to just acknowledge that some people love this but not everybody loves this, um landed the message in a much more powerful and authentic way.
Do you want to talk a little bit about agentic commerce, and where would we be at Cannes if we weren't talking about that? You have a very interesting perspective in that Reddit is the human layer of the internet. It's where people validate people. Um what does that mean for how Reddit shows up in LLMs? Does that mean that more Reddit you think is going to be consumed through LLMs? Do you think more people are going to come to Reddit directly? What are you seeing?
Um I think our relationship with LLMs is similar to our relationship with search. It teaches people broadly that Reddit has content that they might be interested in. Um what we're finding with AI search is or just kind of the chatbots in general is they actually, I think, increase the value of the human content. Right, we're all used to AI products now at this point, and they're very powerful. There's a lot of utility there. But they're summarized, they're sanitized. They have a viewpoint. They do make things up from time to time. And so, what we're seeing, myself included, is you can't just take the AI's word for it. You want to see the context behind that answer. Um and for many, many answers, Reddit is the number one cited source across all AI models that answers on Reddit. And what we found similar to how social media over time made Reddit make more sense, like the more social media got, like performative and shallow and even the organic content is ads, the reason the way Reddit does things the way it does started to stand out more. Our appreciation or our prioritizing authenticity and realness starts to stand out more. With AI, it's the same thing. Um people the the sanitized, summarized, concise, sterile answer from AI causes people to appreciate Reddit more. The real, the messy, the multiple points of views, you know, the tension in the answers, right? Reddit doesn't always agree with you. It doesn't always agree with each other. It never agrees with itself. Um and so um people want people. And in the era of AI, people want people even more. And at the end of the day, LLMs they don't right, they don't live, right? They actually they still at the end of the day are next word predictors. So they can't experience music, they can't wear clothes, they can't wear headphones, they don't have hobbies, they don't even know what hobbies are. Again, they're just moving words around. And so for that real experience, it has to come from other people.
The number one cited by AI platforms, where does that come from? Profound is the source. Quick question for you on the popularity. I think today is your 23rd birthday, 21st birthday?
I think uh it's today-ish. I think it may have been yesterday. We launched Reddit 21 years ago today.
