Welcome to the IAB UK podcast. Jen Wong, COO of Reddit, thank you very much for joining us on the IAB UK podcast.
Tell us about, for the uninitiated maybe, tell us about what is it about Reddit that's different, that's quintessentially not social media something.
Yeah, Reddit was founded 20 years ago. Pretty unbelievable to think about. And it was founded at the same time as Facebook with sort of internet 1.0 values. Openness, connecting people, privacy, and just the ability to connect with people who might have had shared interests. And, you know, Steve and Alexis founded it in their college and was centered around communities. Everything on Reddit is built by individual anonymous people. Everything great on Reddit, the communities, the conversation, the ideas, the moderation, users, you know, plus us as a company. Really very, very different. And so, if you think about social media, the structure of it, which is built around named accounts, sometimes verified profiles, follower models, very different. I mean, Reddit's almost like a foil to social media. It's different in every way. Almost have to take all the things you know and put it aside. And so, Reddit's grown. I mean, it's grown into this incredible place of 100,000 communities that cover every topic you could imagine. I think everybody has a home on Reddit. You know, I'm in gardening and baking and indie rock. Those, you know, photography. Those are the ones I spend time in.
And we think about communities, you know, thriving every day. And then suddenly you were almost half a billion weekly, 120 million daily, majority outside of the US. In a market like the UK, like a top four platform here. Interestingly, majority male, which maybe would be a surprise to people. Majority women. And, you know, I think we continue to be on this journey of bringing, you know, empowering communities, making their knowledge accessible to everybody. And being doing something that I think is very different than social media. What's interesting about Reddit is, you know, for the first 10 years, actually for 20 years we've been focused on communities and conversation. 5, 10 years ago, and I joined 8 years ago, Reddit's corpus has always been open. Right? So, we always believe in the openness of the internet, that people should get answers to their questions without having to log in or have to, you know, share their identity. And our corpus is so big that when you went to search, we had the best answers on the internet. We got indexed and so, we started showing up in search a lot because we're open. And now, you know, fast forward, there's this behavior in traditional search of appending Reddit to search queries to just narrow your search just on Reddit on, you know, best running shoes, best car, whatever it is, because you just want the Reddit answer. Which is really interesting. It's made us, you know, a top 20 term here, top five in the US at some point. Like really just an explicit search term. And then what's happened, obviously the next generation of search is LLMs.
Yeah, of course. And Reddit, again, that corpus is so foundational to helping LLMs actually provide good answers to users because, you know, AI doesn't know anything. AI only knows what it gains from other people's human experience and Reddit is this trove of human experience. I mean, I would argue Reddit, I think we believe it's the most human place on the internet. That's what we strive to be. And so, those human experiences are actually what people are looking for.
You mentioned women there. What other things do you come up against? What other preconceptions do people have? Is it very young?
Yeah, that's a great question. Over the years it's been like sort of myth-busting. Yeah, so I think one myth is that we're male skewed. I mean, we sort of started in verticals like gaming and technology. And so, you know, there's sort of this vision of the gamer dude on Reddit. And if you look at what Reddit's become, like we're really gender balanced globally. It's, you know, best we can tell, 55-45 from third parties that do surveys. Male-female. It's this bell curve actually of age. Over 20 years, maybe the top of the bell curve is like 30. And we tend to get people joining sort of when they're in college, I'd say, when they're developing their own ideas and having to manage life themselves. You know, graduate college, pay rent. You know, deal with roommates, date, get married, all these things. Yeah, you know, the life, get a job, pay bills. But what's interesting is that because we've been around for 20 years, and because Reddit is life experience, you have life experience. It keeps going, right? You get married, you become a parent, you deal with illness, you deal with I mean, all of these things. And so, we had this bell curve of the population. That's why we really believe that everybody can have a home on Reddit because there's always a moment, there's always something in life that somebody else is going through with you as another human.
Yeah. In the same age or the same life stage. And so, we think Reddit's really extensible. So, that, you know, that's one is the demographics. The second is I think sometimes there's been a myth that Redditors don't like ads. Right. That authenticity, you know, Reddit is characterized by being human, authentic, you know, fresh conversation, that flies in the face of authenticity. And it really doesn't, which is really interesting. Redditors actually, they really appreciate when brands engage with them. And they actually, more as our marketing platform has become I think very performance oriented, meaning driving hard marketing outcomes to drive people to do research or install an app that might be interesting to them or make a purchase, our interests are incredibly aligned because if users, you know, aren't happy with the ads they see, like, you know, we don't have a business. And our business has been growing with these hard marketing outcomes. I think we're making like we're really helping users. Like the ads, they want the ads to be helpful. The good news is all the ads on Reddit I think are incredibly relevant because they're either based on where you spend your time on Reddit, like what your interests are, your deeply personal interests, or it's based on the context you're in right now. Like you're in a skiing post and you're looking at like what are the best ski goggles? And you're like, okay, I know what you're interested in, so I can find something relevant for you. So, that's like a second myth I'd say that's out there.
A third I'd say is, you know, privacy. The idea that an anonymous account creates bad behavior or that PII and being under your name creates better behavior. I think if you look at the last decade of what's unfolded on the internet, I don't think that's true. People can misbehave with their names and their PII. I think we've seen that. In fact, what makes the difference on Reddit is because you can be anonymous, you can actually share safely deeply personal things that you need help with. Parenting advice, health advice, marriage advice. The things that you would never put under your name. And where it's maybe not relevant, you know, to see the whole person. It's really your story. It's what it is, the specific thing that you're interested in. You know, if I'm in indie rock, like it doesn't matter to me who the people are. I just know that they all love indie rock and they're experts in that. Doesn't matter where they live or who they are, right? So, it really takes that almost friction out of it. And sometimes that's not obvious to people. I think that could be such an asset and such a source of uniqueness and, you know, safety I think for people and actually conjure really good behavior in addition to just the moderation that can exist on the platform. So, yeah, really those are kind of some of the myths.
Context has always been king. And from a planning perspective, you know, that's never gone away. But perhaps the pendulum has just swung a bit far and perhaps we've now realized that, you know, we don't need to overcomplicate things.
I think so. I mean, if you think about early search before there was like background login etc., it was just people searching and then clicking out on the open internet. And it was 100% context. It was based on what you were searching for. And on Reddit, that's, you know, one of the main targeting parameters for us is like what context are you in today and are you spending time in? We have a lot of words on Reddit, so it's very fine-grained in how we understand that. And, you know, people come to Reddit two ways. They come every day to check in with the communities that they're interested in and dive deep into the conversations, you know, high context because you're in a community that you've chosen to be a part of or in something you're interested in that you've intentionally dove deep into. Or you've come from search and you're one click past a web search, choosing to go to Reddit for a very specific conversation about a topic that you're interested in.
Yeah, yeah. So, the intent on Reddit is so high. Right? The context of why somebody's there is so known. And that creates I think an opportunity to engage them that doesn't need their demographics in order to do that.
Yeah. It sounds like some things throughout Reddit's 20-year history sort of have never changed. You talked about the time that you've been here. What has changed? You feel sort of changed here at Reddit from when you came in.
Yeah, so I joined 8 years ago. I think at the beginning one thing that was interesting is community's always been at the foundation of who we are. Again, communities and people are the foundation of everything amazing on Reddit. The conversation, the post, the moderation, the vibrancy, all of it. So, we have always said, you know, we live and breathe thinking about communities every day. But at the time when I started 8 years ago, community was not a word used as ubiquitously as it is today. Right. It was, you know, social media and, you know, follower economy and there was not an idea of community. And so, we're kind of neither fish nor fowl when we were saying, 'We're a community.' And people were saying, 'Well, what's that? What do I do with that?' And so, it took, I think, some time for people to understand what that is. Fast forward now, I find it interesting people have realized, I think, that communities are so influential, so important, so powerful, like a fundamental human need for belonging. That's why they're so credible and powerful that that word community now is everywhere. It's been adopted even by, you know, social media platforms, etc. They're all community. Creator economy in a way. Yeah. Like communities, right? So, that word has become much more ubiquitous and it's just interesting to see that because when we started, we were the only ones talking about community because it's the main, it's not the side project for us. It is everything that we do.
So much of social media has the creators at the heart of it. We're seeing an explosion in growth. You know, these are all authentic people that talk to you in authentic ways, communities built around them. What do creators look like on Reddit? Or is that not a... We don't talk about it in that way.
Yeah. We don't have influencers.
Is it like personalities?
It's real people. That's right. So, we don't have influencers, you know, where you're following a specific person. The influencer on Reddit is the community. It's the group that has incredible expertise and interest around a topic that can be helpful to you. So, you want great running shoes? Like, you can go to passionate running communities and ask that. You're interested in the best ski equipment or resorts to go to? There's a community that is deeply experienced in that who can answer those questions and is excited to answer those questions with 500 words or more. Yeah, yeah. You know, and really credibly because it comes from first-hand experience. So, the influencer is just the credibility of a group of people who share the same passion and interest. It's really powerful because you get multiple different perspectives, which I think really increases the credibility. That back and forth, that detail is what allows you to believe, 'Okay, there's a lot of people here and here are the different angles.' And there might be disagreement. That's okay. Let me pick and choose from this like what the opinions, the full range of opinions are and make my own conclusion from that.
Let me ask you about three things. One, talk us through mods, moderators, how they work. Kind of the rules, how they get picked. Upvote, downvote, and then talk to us about the algorithm. The algorithm works in a very different way to perhaps we know other social media platforms.
