Twitter malaise a boon for social media rival Reddit

Advertisers fleeing Twitter under Elon Musk are finding a safer home at Reddit, according to one of its top executives.

Reddit has had an Australian office for 18 months, and has tripled its team across sales, community and marketing functions in the last year. (Photo by Lionel BONAVENTURE / AFP)

The advertising crisis engulfing Twitter under new owner Elon Musk is presenting opportunities for rival social media outfit Reddit, according to its global chief marketing officer Roxy Young, who says advertisers dismayed by Twitter’s tumult and moderation issues can find a safer home at Reddit.

Speaking in an interview with The Australian on the ground at the world’s largest consumer technology conference CES, Ms Young said that a multi-tiered moderation system and tight rules around what’s allowed on the platform made Reddit an attractive proposition for advertisers, in comparison to Twitter.

Since Mr Musk took over Twitter in October, numerous brands have paused their advertising amid fears that their ads could appear beside hate speech or other concerning content.

“Reddit has been around for 17 years, and the things that people find on Reddit are community and belonging, and other people who are interested in the things that they‘re interested in, and that’s a different proposition than Twitter,” Ms Young told The Australian.

“On Twitter you’re maybe going to follow a particular personality, or a specific handle. And then on the advertising side, people are coming (to Reddit) because they want to align and engage with our communities.

“And we have several different ways in which we’re ensuring that a community is safe … We offer advertisers the ability to control and target where their ads show up on Reddit, whether they don’t want be adjacent to certain things for example. We have moderation tools to make sure that advertisers can reach their right audience.”

Reddit CMO Roxy Young. Source: Supplied.

Unlike Twitter, the social news website relies on moderators to maintain the standard of content on its ‘subreddits’, or individual forums, with moderators setting rules and settling disputes, and can delete or edit unsuitable content. Twitter on the other hand relies heavily on automation to moderate content, which critics argue has led to a spike in disinformation and hate speech.

Reddit has had an Australian office for 18 months, and has tripled its team across sales, community and marketing functions in the last year.

Ms Young said the most popular Australian Reddit communities have grown over 20 per cent in the last 12 months, and the company has also recently run its first local advertising campaign in a bid to raise awareness about the platform. There are an estimated 52 million daily active Reddit users worldwide, and Reddit is the 10th most popular social network in the US.

The executive pointed to Reddit research of Australian social media users showing rival platforms like Facebook and Instagram are associated with negative terms like shady, shallow, bullying, and judgmental, while Reddit is associated with positive traits such as welcoming, safe, and curious.

The company is preparing for what should be one of 2023’s most anticipated IPOs, having suspended earlier plans amid the conflict in Ukraine and tech downturn. It initially filed to go public in 2021, and is now widely expected to make its market debut in late 2023 with a current estimated market capitalisation of $US15bn. The company did not comment on those plans.

At its core Reddit is a social sharing website, in which users submit links, pictures, and text, which everyone can then vote on. The website has more than 100,000 communities, or ‘subreddits’, ranging from plants, to politics, parenting, cars and cartoons.

“Overall we’re so excited about this business and its future; Reddit is fulfilling a core human need, which is that everybody needs to feel like they’re part of the community and feel like they belong,” Ms Young said.

“For the next 12 to 24 months, we’ll be focused on a few things including making sure that the Reddit community is the de facto place for people to come together and engage and collaborate. And the second thing is simplicity, and I think Reddit can do a lot to make sure that it’s simple and easy and intuitive to understand for people around the world, as we continue to become a global platform.

“And I think the third thing is search. If you’ve been following any of the trends recently, I think it’s very common that people are adding Reddit at the end of their searches. And so we know that we are sitting on this huge corpus of data, and text based information where people are providing responses and real answers to questions. So when you’re coming to Reddit, to search for something, we need to make sure that we can help you find your community quickly and easily.”

David Swan travelled to Las Vegas as a guest of Hisense.