What is it that drives one of the most influential platforms on the internet, an online community where 97 million daily active uniques meet on Reddit, which is often called the front page of the internet? But Reddit is not just a platform for memes and debates, it's actually a hub for authentic engagement and interest-based communities. That's one of the reasons I find myself endlessly scrolling every night. And from its massive growth in user base to its innovative advertising strategies, I wanted to learn more about how Reddit is redefining how people interact with content and each other online. So today I'm going to be joined by Jen Wong. She is the COO of Reddit and we're going to explore what sets Reddit apart in this increasingly crowded social and digital landscape. We'll also discuss the platform's meteoric rise in users, how Reddit is leveraging AI and machine learning to improve accessibility and search, and also its unique approach to conversational commerce that's changing the way people engage with brands.
And Jen is also going to be sharing her insights into how Reddit ensures safety, inclusivity, and allows users to age into the platform while delivering value for advertisers in a community-first environment. Quite a tricky balance I would imagine. So what makes Reddit a thriving ecosystem of ideas and how is it shaping the future of online interactions? Let's get Jen onto the podcast to unpack the story behind the platform's continued success. So a massive warm welcome to the show. Jen, can you tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do?
Thanks for having me. I'm Jen Wong. My day job is I'm the COO of Reddit, which practically means that I lead our business, which is primarily advertising today and a little data licensing. I joined the company about six and a half years ago and I've spent most of my career in consumer media and tech. So I love being at the intersection of how people are finding information, how it's changing, how the internet is changing how people do that. And that's always the intersection of culture and information and technology, which is a fun place to be.
Well I was so excited to get you on the podcast today and sit down with you because I suspect as this is a Daily Tech podcast, just about every single person listening will have a Reddit account. It's where we all get our information from, and not only that, there's such a vibrant community in there on any subject that you could possibly name. And more recently Reddit has seen tremendous growth too, especially with us just hitting an all-time high. I was reading about before you came on to join me today, so I'm curious, I've got to ask, what do you attribute this surge in users to and what's it say about the shifting landscape of how ultimately people seek information online today?
Yeah, I mean, there are more people coming to Reddit than ever before. We were at an all-time high in terms of users. You know, we had over 97 million daily users globally, up over 50% year-by-year, so it's really accelerated. I mean, look, we've always believed that everyone can find a home on Reddit, you know, because everybody has interests and passions, and every community and interest is represented on Reddit. So we always believed it was very extensible. And you know, Reddit's been around for 19 years and over that time has expanded in terms of its topics and its breadth, and continues to do that.
In the last couple of years, a couple of things that we've done is we've done a lot of work on the product. I think the product really fulfills the promise of being able to connect you with communities of interest and get a human perspective, a high-quality human perspective that's not tainted by influence or anything else. That's real-world perspective, and Reddit has just gotten, I think, more extensible and more massive as a result. I think more people can access Reddit because the product has made it easier to find your community. I think that's a big part of it and we'll continue to do that. I think that's something, as we grow internationally, as we continue to do work on the product, Reddit will get better at doing that.
And look, Reddit's really unique, it's really different. It's organized in communities, it's anonymous, it's moderated by users. It's not people turning a camera on themselves, it's not a follower-driven model, which is very common in social media. In fact, 30 to 70% of Redditors are not on peer platforms, and I think that's because Reddit is just so unique in what it offers. So you know, I think Reddit is just becoming much more accessible to a lot more people, which is exciting.
It really is. And although we talk about how people get information online, the word that we've both used a few times already is community. And it's not just that community coming together about shared interest, I think it's also sharing diverse opinions. And I think that is so important in this world of polarization at the moment. And also Reddit has become one of the most searched items on Google as a result. So what do you think it is that sets Reddit apart from other online platforms, especially in terms of unique information and conversations users can find on the platform?
Well, you know, it's interesting. Reddit, last I checked, is the sixth most searched term in 2024 in the US, which is pretty stunning. I mean, that means people are intentionally typing in Reddit in their search queries and it's to get information. And that's because the information on Reddit, you just can't find anywhere else. Because Reddit is a set of communities that are really well informed, they're incredibly passionate about their topics, and it's real. It's real people, right? So it's everything from, you know, hey, I'm a new parent and I need gear for XYZ and you want a real parent who has actually had to load a car seat into a car to tell you that this is the easiest one to put in. Or hey, I want to make the best pizza possible, what are the three things that I need? Someone's actually have to have tasted that pizza and been through that journey to give you that advice. And you just can't find that anywhere else.
And over the course of 19 years we have the equivalent of that incredible information, that human perspective on so many topics. And so, you know, while you might join and you often join Reddit in your 20s, let's say, when you're developing a sense of self or separating from parents and getting your first job, you age with Reddit. You never age out of Reddit. Because as you get married, have kids, buy a house, buy a car, deal with aging parents, like there are other humans in the world who can help you through that. And that's so unique. So Reddit is helpful sort of at every stage of your life.
And I think one of the things that makes Reddit stand out as well is it's not built around a social graph but rather focusing on interests, hobbies, and topics that we're passionate about. And I say that as a Redditor myself, so can you tell me a bit more about how that approach ultimately creates a different experience for users compared to, let's say, traditional social media platforms where they get algorithms that point them to information?
Well, the first is we're anonymous, and that makes a big difference in terms of your sort of personal privacy and your sense of safety. You know, if you want to go in and get help on a medical issue, you wouldn't do that publicly, at least most people wouldn't. So there's a sense of comfort there. All of our communities are moderated by people, and people who really care about that topic. And what that allows is for very nuanced conversation. We obviously provide a layer of safety and universal rules across Reddit, but then each community has their own rules, and that allows them to apply nuance to those rules.
You're in the science community, you need research that's been peer-reviewed in the last six months, that's the bar that they hold for that. That's different than, you know, an espresso community, that's going to have a different rule, right? So each community can sort of figure out how it maintains the best quality conversation. The third is voting, and voting, we have upvotes and downvotes, and downvotes are really important because they allow anybody to say this is just not good. And it's voted on first by the community that it's posted in, people who know something about that topic to say, you know, is this relevant or not.
But when you get the upvotes and the downvotes, everybody only gets one vote. So you have to have thousands of people vote on a post up in order for it to be widely seen and enjoyed. You get a very credible signal because when thousands of people vote and that's what goes in our feed, it's a real differentiator. So it's not driven by algorithms, it's not driven by something that just you see, it's driven by the voting of thousands of people and people in communities who know this topic. Very different in terms of surfacing what's good.
And I love that phrase you mentioned a few moments ago in the previous question about how people age into Reddit and how user engagement deepens over time rather than tapering off, as seen on other platforms. Anything else you can share around that and why you think that is, and the kind of journey that people go on as they age on Reddit?
Well, this amazing thing is that when people join Reddit, they might join, I think it's like 15, 20 communities, and then as your life evolves, you join more. Right, as I said, you get married, you have kids, you want to join parenting subreddits. Suddenly you're buying a house, okay, you're now dealing with aging parents, like you are now joining more communities. And people four or five years in, I mean, they're in two, three times the number of communities because their interests have evolved. And you can explicitly learn about these other topics and so Reddit can adjust to who you are and what's on your mind and what you're looking for, because it's so wide in what it covers and because, you know, our job is to help you find your communities at the moment.
And so it really grows with you. And now Reddit, even though we have a lot of people join us in, let's say, their 20s, is like this bell curve of the population after 19 years, because we have continued to retain and engage even more our loyal users from years ago. And that's very unusual in the world of social media where a lot of people age out, where the experience is very focused around a certain activity or moment in your life where you're communicating in a certain way with a certain set of people. Reddit is just something that grows with you privately over time.
And something else that we talk about on these podcasts every day is how technology is impacting areas that we don't automatically associate with technology in a variety of ways. And the big star of the show at the moment is AI and machine learning. And I'm not sure if people would associate Reddit with that world, or indeed what goes on under the hood to display some of the content and conversations that we read. But Reddit is making significant investments in AI and machine learning, from what I've been reading, to better user experiences such as machine translation, enhanced content discovery. There's a few things that I've read, but can you share more about these initiatives and ultimately how they're helping users find their home on Reddit?
AI is one of the most profound technology shifts that will happen in so many ways, right? It is tied to search, it's tied to how people traverse and discover and find information on the internet, it's tied to productivity and how we work every day across every function. So it's a very profound influence. And I think it's a tremendous opportunity for Reddit in a number of ways. The first is that today almost every general LLM or large language model uses Reddit's data to train on, to understand relevance, to understand conversation, because Reddit is the home of conversation between many people. Right, that's the best part of Reddit. And as that evolved and we have a big search footprint because we have some of the most unique and valuable perspectives on the internet, I think the value of our human perspective just goes up.
It goes up because these models need that information to train on. It has to summarize something, in a lot of cases it's summarized in Reddit, because you still need a human to decide: was this car easy to drive? Did I like it? Was this recipe actually delicious? Did this product actually do what it was supposed to do in real life? And then it'll be summarized and reviewed, etc., in an LLM, but the LLM can't do that. And so the human perspective on Reddit, I think, just becomes more important in people's need to get information.
And then the second is it's an opportunity for us to improve our product. So Reddit has grown mostly with an English corpus, started in the US and the UK, Canada, Australia. 50% of our traffic is from outside of the US but a lot of those users still operate in English. But the machine translation, the quality of machine translation using AI is so high now that you can really get the vernacular and the nuance. And so we're in the process of using machine translation to help have non-English experiences, based on the corpus of content that we already have. The universal questions like on AskReddit, which are just life, human questions that everybody universally wants to talk about and get maybe even a global perspective on. So we're excited about how that can accelerate that process of globalizing and localizing.
And then we think about search a lot, because today a lot of people search and land on Reddit. And search on Reddit has been getting better but not the best product. But a lot of our new users, they come to Reddit trying to search, right? Because they're trying to get information. And as I said, AI and search, I think, are melding in terms of a technology and experience, and that's an opportunity for us to improve the search. We want to be much better when people are trying to search Reddit.
