Ryan Day
Social news aggregation and forum website Reddit is betting that the rise of AI is good for its business.
As users turn to large language models for fast answers, the platform is seeing them return to its forums to verify what they find.
In an interview with AdNews, Ryan Day, sales manager at Reddit Australia, outlined the platform's expanding ad offering, pointing to 40% audience growth from 2024 to 2025 and 17 million monthly Australian users.
"AI has been great for getting answers fast, but people are coming to Reddit to validate those answers," said Day.
It's a pitch that cuts both ways, with the platform simultaneously leaning into AI-powered ad tools while selling advertisers on the irreplaceable value of human conversation.
"We're using AI to make a campaign manager's job a little bit easier and take a little bit of the heavy lifting off them," said Day.
"Reddit Max is leveraging AI to do some automation for you. It's optimising not only your targeting, but it's also giving optimisation suggestions for creative, for copy, for bidding, etc."
Day described Reddit as sitting somewhere between search and social, with feeds curated by community engagement rather than algorithm.
"We do get bucketed into social, but we're very much not," he said.
"Feed isn't curated by an algorithm - it's curated by the content that is the most engaging."
Native formats are also being pushed harder in the Australian market.
Paid AMAs, a Reddit specific offering where brands field questions directly from Reddit communities, are gaining traction alongside long-form posts.
"Those AMAs are great because they let people on Reddit get access, whether it's a famous actor or a scientist or an engineer," said Day.
The Australian Federal Government recently utilised Reddit's AMA strategy in a organ donation campaign.
The Reddit run AMA connected a transplant recipient with more than 1.5M Reddit users, beating Reddit benchmarks by speaking about his experience and the benefits of donation, leading the Federal Government to use some of the content for a video ad.
When AdNews questioned Reddit on its measurement tools and ad spend transparency, identified by IAB as a leading market concern, Day pointed to the platform's closed ecosystem.
"We don't have an audience network placing ads off-platform," he said.
"Anything post‑campaign can be viewed in our Ads Manager tool, so people can see which communities their ads have been running on."
Looking ahead, Reddit is pitching itself as a live research and creative lab as much as a reach vehicle.
"We've heard Reddit described as the world's largest focus group for brands," said Day, pointing to advertisers using community intelligence to monitor conversations about their products and feed insights back into creative and product development.
"Some are making adjustments to their creative and how they show up on Reddit. Others are going, 'Hey, there's some great product feedback here. We can take this back internally'," he said.
"I'm just really excited, because I think we're starting to see that cusp, more and more brands really lean into what makes Reddit unique."
Have something to say on this? Share your views in the comments section below. Or if you have a news story or tip-off, drop us a line at adnews@yaffa.com.au
Sign up to the AdNews newsletter, like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter for breaking stories and campaigns throughout the day.