2018 was a big year for Reddit. The company executed an almost comically overdue redesign, continued to clean up toxic communities and promoted new features that are pushing the company toward new areas of growth.
The company’s engagement has climbed as well, with a 22 percent YoY increase in gross interactions, be that a comment, post or vote. Just as importantly, more eyes were seeing these interactions, with a 30 percent increase in page views, now clocking in at 14 billion views per month, the company says. Reddit shared some of these stats in a year-end blog post, and while they didn’t update stale statistics on active users, the company did offer some more high-level details on certain verticals on their site that have seen engagement increase.
Reddit has long been a hub for photos and video content, but until the past couple of years, most of this content was hosted off-server, with most videos being drawn in from YouTube and images being largely embedded via Imgur. The company started hosting images in mid-2016, but it wasn’t until last year that serious efforts were put into making sure that videos lived on the site.
Last month, the company says that native videos on the site earned 1.4 billion video views, a 40 percent increase over the previous month. Furthermore, the company says about 400,000 hours’ worth of video is being watched on a daily basis.
Video was a big priority this past year, but the company also made some interesting strides with their efforts surrounding news curation. The company began testing a beta of a news tab on its iOS tab, bringing stories sorted by category into a central location. Other features like updated live threads saw increased engagement; in their blog post, the company highlighted that a live thread on news regarding Hurricane Harvey had more than 50,000 concurrent users scanning for information.
Perhaps the biggest news in 2018 was that there just wasn’t that much awful Reddit company news this year. There were some issues with foreign influence campaigns, a relatively light security breach and some more issues that are pretty much guaranteed on a site with the user base Reddit has, but for the most part, Reddit leadership didn’t have any massive screw-ups this year, which is a pretty major sign of maturity for a company that doesn’t often enjoy much peace and quiet.