AI can answer questions. That doesn't mean people want less human interaction.
At Cannes Lions, Brian Sozzi sits down with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman to discuss the future of the internet, the rise of AI, and why real conversations may become even more valuable as AI-generated content spreads.
The conversation explores online communities, advertising, AI partnerships, search, growth, and what the next decade of the internet could look like.
Timestamps
00:00 Reddit turns 21
00:45 Why Reddit started
01:35 The path to 1 billion users
02:17 Reddit's next improvements
03:20 Why Reddit keeps growin...
What Steve Huffman said
Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.
Steve Huffman, CEO and co-founder of Reddit, discussed the company's 21st birthday, its founding in 2005 to create a user-controlled feed of interesting content, and its current scale of about 120 million daily users. He outlined plans for improving the core app, feeds, and search, and hinted at new video capabilities later this year. Huffman identified the biggest growth challenge as connecting new users to relevant subreddits in their first session. He noted that advertising revenue has grown over 60% for seven quarters, with about a third of users not on other platforms and 40% of organic conversations being commercial. On AI, he said summaries have a time and place, and that AI search products make Reddit's human perspectives more valuable. He declined to announce new LLM partnership deals but affirmed Reddit's data is essential. He predicted the primary computer interface may shift to voice and audio, potentially leading to audio Reddit features.
Key takeaways
Reddit has about 120 million daily users and aims to reach a billion.
Advertising revenue has grown over 60% for seven consecutive quarters.
About 40% of organic Reddit conversations are commercial in nature.
About a third of Reddit users are not on other platforms.
Huffman declined to announce new LLM partnership deals but said Reddit's data is essential.
8:02As these contracts come up for renewal with OpenAI and Google, do you expect significantly more money given how fast they're growing and the valuable information you have within your platform, right?
8:51And then secondarily, how does that impact a business like Reddit?
We actually do celebrate it or acknowledge it. But then the question people keep asking me is, 'What's your perspective or how does it feel?' And the answer is Reddit has been bigger than I ever thought it would be since August 2005. So it's just been a ride since then.
You've told this story before, but it bears repeating, especially given your big birthday. What made you found Reddit in 2005? And like, oh yeah, there was no AI back in 2005.
So in 2005, it was just hard to find interesting things to read. You kind of had to know the websites you liked or maybe a blog you liked, but there wasn't a feed of interesting things. And so that's what we wanted to make: a feed of interesting things. We wanted to make a feed of interesting things that instead of being controlled by an editor was controlled by users. And so that was the simple idea. Users submit links, users vote on them, and our front page is interesting content. And it's just all kind of evolved from there.
You know, your birthday had me even reflecting a bit too. I had a chat last year with Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang. Another OG of the internet. What makes you co-founders tick differently? I mean, you're still here out on a pier at Cannes Lions, a big event leading the company.
I think, one, it's the main thing I've done in my life. Two, our aspirations are so big. So where are we today? We're about 120 million daily users. And so we think, how do we get to a billion users? Which, by the way, isn't even the biggest on the internet. It's just another nice milestone. And we just every day I think chip away at it. We've been kind of taking one step at a time with Reddit for so long. I trust the process that if we just make a little bit of improvement every day, we'll get to where we want to go eventually.
Well, so on the consumer side, we're doing a lot of work in the core app, in the feeds. The story for us has been the same for a while: every time we make Reddit more friendly, more easy to use, we grow. And so we drive growth through quality. So a lot of work there. We'll start to do some interesting things with video later this year. I think that'll be fun. Our search product is getting better and better. And then on the ad side, we're constantly taking iterative steps there, making that product better and better. Recently we announced some new tools for creatives to create ads on Reddit. So that's under constant evolution as well.
So when we think about something like video, what we don't do is say, 'What's our short-form video strategy?' What we do is we say video Reddit needs to have amazing video capability. So the horizontal capability, being able to upload, have the player be great, have the transition from the feed to the player to the comments back to the feed, all that be seamless. And if we create the video capability and integrate it naturally, then most likely what will happen is our users will invent ways of using video on Reddit. And they'll do things that we didn't anticipate. And that's how we'll know we've gotten it right.
14 more exchanges in this transcript
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Huffman, S. (2026, June 24). The internet's next big advantage is being human: Reddit CEO [Interview transcript]. Yahoo Finance. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1036890/
MLA
Steve Huffman. "The internet's next big advantage is being human: Reddit CEO." Yahoo Finance, 24 Jun. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1036890/.
BibTeX
@misc{huffman2026_1036890,
author = {Steve Huffman},
title = {The internet's next big advantage is being human: Reddit CEO},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Yahoo Finance. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {jun},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1036890/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
