Reddit – now a publicly traded company with greater control over revenue growth – is placing a lot of emphasis on growing its international audience, starting with Francophones. CEO Steve Huffman confirmed in its first-ever earnings call that the company is now working on real-time automatic translations of the site’s content into French, thanks to advances in large language models.
He also addressed the expansion of the ecosystem in a few U-turns. It wants to woo developers with new tools – a surprise given the company’s history on that front; and it plans to reintroduce Reddit Gold — another surprise considering the company ended its virtual currency efforts less than a year ago.
Moves like these are a glimpse of what the future, not the present, could look like for Reddit. Today, the news is relatively encouraging: Reddit’s revenue rose 48% year-over-year to $243 million in its most recent quarter, and its unique user count rose 37% to 82.7 million. (This number includes both logged in and logged out users, similar to how Twitter – now called X – counted its viewers when it was still public.)
User growth and translation
Huffman said on the earnings call that half of Reddit’s audience is based in the U.S., suggesting the company is more focused on increasing international share.
“We are still 50/50 US to non-US, but our competitors are more than 80% to 90% non-US,” he said. “I think there is a big opportunity there.” He went on to call automatic, AI-powered translation “one of the big innovations for us in the short to medium term.”
“So today we are translating our entire corpus, which is predominantly written in English, into the other languages and hope that this will help accelerate international growth,” he said.
In his words, the site-wide translation effort is still a challenge, despite many resources being put into it. Huffman noted that this content is also indexed in Google results for the French language, driving more traffic to the site, and that the company would like to tackle Spanish next.
Reddit has been offering post-based translation with support for eight languages since last year.
Developer tools
It was surreal to hear Huffman talk about developer tools on the call. As recently as July 2023, the company became embroiled in a massive dispute with third-party developers over API changes – resulting in the suspension of hundreds of subreddits in protest of API changes.
Now the social network is in Play Nice mode. Huffman said there are plans for tools that could “push the boundaries of what a subreddit can be.” He gave examples of some ongoing experiments such as live scores on some sports subreddits and a live stock ticker on r/wallstreetbets, the subreddit known for the Gamestop stock saga.
A few hundred developers are already testing these new experiences, he said. Reddit plans to add more developers from the waitlist this summer and enable monetization features later in the year.
Further announcements
Earlier this year, Reddit signed a deal with Google to allow the search engine company to use the social network’s data. In response to a question from the Reddit community, Huffman said the company plans to license data to other companies as well. This has been a big issue and controversial in many cases, as users today may not want their data used for AI training or other common purposes, for example. As you may have guessed, Huffman insisted that the company is “considerate and selective” when selecting its partners.
The company is currently looking to build more infrastructure to generate revenue. While gold and another currency initiative, blockchain-based Community Points, were both discontinued last year, the virtual currency is getting another airing on the platform as it represents an opportunity for Reddit to diversify its business model. During the earnings call, the company announced that it plans to launch a “revamped” Gold product, with programs that will allow users to spend and earn money on the platform.
Last month, Reddit CPO Pali Bhat mentioned some of these new initiatives in an interview with TechCrunch, and now the company is taking steps to leverage these growth tools.