In a year-end retrospective released this morning, Reddit says its user base grew 30% this year to reach 430 million monthly active users, as of the end of October. Its users also contributed 199 million posts, 1.7 billion comments and 32 billion upvotes, the company says.
Last year, Reddit reported 330 million monthly active users — bigger than Twitter.
Monthly comments and monthly views were also up on an annual basis in 2019, with increases of 37% and 54%, respectively.
The most-upvoted post this year referenced Reddit’s fundraise led by China’s Tencent, which in February led Reddit’s $300 million Series D, valuing the site at $3 billion. Users were concerned at the time the investment would lead to Chinese censorship, which led them to flood the site with images that would be forbidden in China. One of these, a photo of “tank man” at Tienanmen Square, then became the most-upvoted post, with 228,000 upvotes.
Meanwhile, the most upvoted AMA (Ask Me Anything) post on the site was with Bill Gates, which received 110,000 upvotes.
Reddit also noted a number of trends across its more than 100,000 active communities, including sizable increases in its top 50 beauty and style communities, which grew 63+% and 52%+ year-over-year, respectively. To some extent, these increases were driven by the blogger beauty feuds — for example, the r/beautyguruchatter community jumped up by 87% year-over-year. The r/skincareaddiction community was the most popular beauty community, reaching over 1 million subscribers, Reddit says.
Wedding-focused Reddit communities also grew, with r/weddingsunder10k up by 109% and r/bridezillas up by 852%, year-over-year. Family and parenting communities grew by 87% year-over-year.
The top 50 food communities grew 35% year-over-year, and several spirits-focused communities grew — like r/tequila (+99%), r/whiskey (+52%), r/vodka (+44%), r/bourbon (+27%) and r/winemaking (+16%). The top 50 fitness/wellness communities grew by 30%.
News was also a big focus on Reddit this year, with the top 50 news communities growing by 17% year-over-year. The company in 2018 first introduced its “news” tab to drive more traffic to timely articles. This appears to have worked, given the increases. This year, top stories included Robert Mueller’s hearings, the current impeachment inquiry, the Hong Kong protests, climate change and more; r/politics remained the top news community.
Elsewhere on the site, the top 50 entertainment communities grew by 27%, the top 50 sports communities grew 34%, and the top 50 gaming communities grew 42%.
The full report has even more data and details.
One thing Reddit’s year-end review didn’t delve into, however, was its hard numbers around page views or revenue. Reddit was said to be on track to reach $119 million in U.S. ad revenues this year, according to a forecast from eMarketer, which would give it a 0.1% share of the U.S. digital ad market. By 2021, the analysts estimated it would more than double those revenues, to $261.7 million, to claim a 0.2% share. Mobile is expected to account for 57% of revenues in 2019.
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