It was once a niche, unmoderated corner of the internet reserved for male gamers and web developers to geek out, but today, Reddit is one of the fastest-growing social media platforms across all user demographics.
A quick ask around my Whatsapp groups tells me why it’s appealing to the millennial female. “It’s the source of all knowledge and free of influencers,” says one friend. “I use it because it’s real people, and ChatGPT is soulless and makes me sad,” says another. “I like how old school the platform is — it feels quite separate from adverts, image saturation, influencing,” says a third.
In a world where consumers feel like they’re constantly being sold to, Reddit COO Jen Wong says the platform’s consistent growth over the last 20 years is down to its proposition as a more private, trustworthy corner of the internet, which feels authentic compared to everywhere else. It’s also emerging as an antidote to automated social algorithms and AI. “People like the idea that you’re not influenced by one person or brand like on other social media, but a group of people who give different perspectives around something they deeply care and know about,” Wong tells me. “And as the world turns more to AI and that separation from humans, the value of human intelligence on Reddit is standing out even more.”
This feeling was backed up by the stats in Reddit’s annual results earlier this month. Globally, it’s grown 19% in the last year to over 121 million daily active users, considerably higher than Meta’s 7% daily active user growth. This growth is split across all geographies — in the UK alone, Reddit’s monthly active user base has grown 88% in the last two years, overtaking TikTok. In both the UK and the US, Reddit’s surging user base is now more than 50% women, with Wong adding that it’s pretty evenly split across other demographics like age, too.
“We started with [a] tech dude bend, but it’s now really gender-balanced. In fact, in the UK and Australia, it’s majority women,” she says. “And if you look at the last couple of years, our high-growth areas have been fashion, beauty, TV fandom, and parenting — all universal life things, so there’s no overall demographic skew.”
Since its IPO in March 2024, Reddit has also been a major benefactor of the AI explosion — albeit quite accidentally. The large language models (LLMs) that power AI chatbots like ChatGPT are trained on real-world data, making the vast repository of real human conversations Reddit has amassed since it was founded in 2005 a vital knowledge source for companies like OpenAI, Google and Perplexity, as they race to improve their AI products. On the flip side, consumers are increasingly turning to Reddit’s detailed, human-led subreddits (user-created community pages dedicated to specific topics or interests) as the antidote to those very AI platforms.
“Reddit stands in contrast to this massive growth of AI as the most human place on the internet,” says Wong. “And it turns out that AI just doesn’t know anything unless it’s put there by humans, and it has to learn from humans. So now, with the evolution of search to LLMs, the human, authentic and fresh conversations on Reddit are appreciated by both ordinary and AI search.”
An engaged fashion community
One of the main things driving users to Reddit’s treasure trove of human conversations is pre-purchase product validation. In the UK, 74% of people who discovered a product anywhere on the internet at some point came to Reddit to either validate or do further research on that purchase, according to the platform’s research.
As it turns out, the two things Reddit’s growing consumer user base cares the most about are fashion and beauty. In 2024, the number of fashion and beauty posts on Reddit grew 150% year-on-year, as people turned to fellow consumers for product reviews and trusted feedback they felt they may not find elsewhere. Four out of five UK Reddit users, for example, looking to buy fashion or beauty products in the next three months say, “Conversations on Reddit help me feel more confident about my purchases,” while more than three in four (76%) of Reddit’s US users believe that posts on the platform are more honest and truthful than other social media, according to Reddit research.
Consumers are turning to Reddit as much for a sense of community among like-minded fashion and beauty lovers as they are for trusted human insights to validate purchases. Globally, beauty conversations on the platform have seen a 71% year-on-year growth, as it increasingly becomes the destination for beauty and skincare fans to connect, dissect ingredients, and make unique discoveries and recommendations. Some of the platform’s most popular beauty communities include: r/SkincareAddiction, which has more than two million weekly visitors; its luxury spin-off r/SkincareAddictionLux, which has more than 165,000 weekly visitors; and the UK’s r/fashion, which has more than 360,000 members and has grown more than 198% in the last year.
Users typically spend much longer dwelling on these detailed threads than they do on rival social platforms’ short-form content posts, which lends Reddit a unique ability to pitch itself as the destination to reach high-intent purchasers. “Fashion and beauty are naturally growing conversationally on our platform, and these categories are noticing,” says Wong. “So that’s a very natural area for us to now fuel our partnerships.”
A booming advertising business
Despite its authentic, non-commercial rep, Reddit is neither AI nor ad-free. In fact, the platform’s 69% revenue growth to $2.2 billion in 2025 was “purely driven by advertising”, Wong says. Of the platform’s $726 million fourth-quarter revenues in 2025, 95% ($690 million) was attributed to ads. Like all social (and AI) platforms, Reddit turned to advertising to monetize the business once it had scaled its user base enough, and hired Wong in 2018 to grow its ads business. Adverts on Reddit are designed to mimic organic posts, and can be placed within user feeds (like the home feed, popular feeds, and within subreddits), as well as directly inside comment threads.
Since its IPO, the company has accelerated this ads push, launching several ad formats and products within its marketing platform so that brands can engage. First came Reddit Pro in 2024, a free-to-use insights platform for brands to monitor their presence within conversations and threads, as a precursor to begin posting on Reddit.
“When I joined eight years ago, one of the things we believed was that Reddit has incredible raw materials for an advertising business,” Wong says, adding that agencies and brands have access to deeper Reddit insights, and use these for their broader “internet listening”. “Advertising creatives are all on Reddit and a lot of them get their ideas from Reddit because it’s really the heart of internet culture, so they’re often putting Reddit into the mix and saying, ‘Whoa, there’s something happening that we can get into for our campaign.’”
In the last 12 months, Reddit has rolled out several ad products and formats across text, video, images and carousels, positioning the platform as a solid marketing distribution platform for image-conscious fashion and beauty brands.
“Fashion and beauty brands have been coming to us to advertise, because our engagement is very deep and you can convey a lot more information, which is pretty unique,” Wong says, highlighting the luxury brand storytelling opportunity that Reddit’s longer post format opens up for brands. “We have formats where you can go deep into the details of product features, or write about a product’s inspiration — people on Reddit will read a thousand-plus words in your ad.”
A core part of luxury brands’ storytelling takes place on rival platforms with more visual interfaces, while Reddit has long been seen as a more of an anonymous, no-frills interface where text dominates image. But Wong says that Reddit is organically “becoming much more visual” over time, with users increasingly posting their own images and carousels in threads, something her team is leaning into with the rollout of more multimedia ad formats. In late 2025, Reddit launched Video Views, a video ad optimization tool that allows brands to target users the platform’s own AI model determines as most likely to watch their video to completion, or for at least six seconds, based on their Reddit behavior — a quota that Wong says is longer than most other platforms’ three-second mark.
“Just because the environment isn’t historically video-centric doesn’t mean our users don’t respond to video ad creative,” Wong says. “In fact, video is emerging as our dominant format from an advertising perspective — people are responding really well,” she says. In November 2025, Reddit also launched its Interactive Ads feature, where brands can now pay to run ads like countdowns, quizzes, and trivia to engage with users on both feeds and within threads.
Mac Cosmetics used this feature to launch its first Reddit ad in January, consisting of a thread asking users what Mac product they should bring back. The brand followed this up with an “ask me anything”, featuring the brand’s global director of makeup artistry Romero Jennings, which amassed over six million views and 14,000 shares. Reddit has also begun testing verified brand profiles over the last couple of months, where brands can pay to host their own threads.
How brands should show up
For fashion and beauty brands wanting to engage with consumers on Reddit via these new advertising formats, there’s a balance to be struck between brand storytelling and retaining user trust. New users are drawn to Reddit for its relative non-commerciality compared with other social platforms, valuing its anonymity. In a 2025 survey of Gen Zs, conducted by Vogue Business and youth culture agency Archrival, for example, 65% of respondents said they use Reddit to find and discover products, valuing the platform’s privacy and the ability to ask questions anonymously that they might not want to ask on more exposed profiles elsewhere. This is exactly what the platform risks quashing if those users were to begin feeling alienated by too many brand ads. But Wong believes there’s a balance to be struck via improving ad relevance and platform-native execution.
“I think there’s a little bit of a myth that, because Reddit is such an authentic space, Redditors don’t like ads. But I don’t think that’s true,” she says. “I think that’s really born itself out, because what Redditors want is relevant, helpful, good ads, and over time I think we’re delivering that — our ads should be logical and not surprising.” Reddit doesn’t track user behavior off-platform like some other social platforms do via data-gathering “pixels” embedded within other websites, but it does use its own AI models to track behavior across its own subreddits, communities, and threads — data brands can then access to tailor their ads for relevancy.
Wong says that in the first instance, brands should dip their toes into the platform with insights, before testing conversation-based ads like jumping in on threads and answering user questions about products with product details. “We really believe in starting with, OK, where’s the conversation today?” she says.
Wong encourages brands to think of the platform as “the opposite” to traditional social media, where they’d begin with a brand profile, amass followers, post, and then boost the post. Instead, consumers on Reddit want to feel listened to, they want learn something and have two-way interactions with brands — a trend that echoes the move of Gen Z and Alpha consumers towards gaming and social platforms that offer an element of co-creation, beyond the passive scroll.
“Everything on Reddit is built for an anonymous person, so the way that communities expect brands to come to the table is through engaging in existing communities and conversations,” Wong says, emphasizing the potential that two-way content ads hold for luxury’s higher consideration purchases, in particular.
In Mac’s case, global creative director Nicola Formichetti says his team worked closely with Reddit to choreograph a plan allowing the brand “to show up like a Redditer”. “Our social team recognized that users value the platform for its authenticity and lack of overt commercialization,” Formichetti says, adding that his team spent months “listening” in on Reddit’s relevant subreddits to understand the rules and cultural nuances of the platform before posting.
“Rather than repurposing traditional marketing content, we rebuilt our content pillars specifically for Reddit, prioritizing conversation and value over promotion,” he continues. “The focus is on showing up in discussions users already care about, contributing expertise, and engaging in two-way dialog. The biggest learning has been that tone matters: we aim to sound human, transparent, and helpful, always adding value first and avoiding overly promotional messaging to build trust over time.”
Wong highlights how fashion brands can lean into the post-purchase community and conversations on the platform, too. “Especially in a world where so much is transacted in e-commerce, people want to know about a watch’s weight and things like craftsmanship,” Wong says, citing the lengthy pre-purchase conversations that take place among luxury watch lovers on subreddit r/Watchexchange. “But what’s really interesting for luxury is the post-purchase engagement we see,” she says. A consumer that’s just purchased a new Rolex will take to the thread to ask questions like how to polish the watch or accessorize it, for example — moments she says are ripe for brand engagement.
Reddit’s AI-powered shopping future
In the last few months, AI platforms have joined Meta and TikTok in the race to host the entire shopping journey, from research to discovery to purchase, most recently launching integrated checkout features so that people can purchase within tools like ChatGPT. Last year, Reddit also joined the race, launching its first shoppable ad product, Dynamic Product Ads (DPAs).
Wong says this first Reddit shopping feature allows brands to use contextual signals from conversations to match products from their product catalogs with Reddit users, based on their in-platform shopping journeys. These DPAs can include product catalogs and listing carousels with images, shown on the main home and community Reddit feeds, or within the comments section of conversations, which users can click on to be redirected to the brand site to purchase. Currently, these shoppable ads are only available within the platform’s main feeds, but Wong hints that Reddit may explore introducing them to its own AI chat — Reddit Answers — looking ahead, as consumers become accustomed to shopping within AI search elsewhere.
“In this ever-changing world, who knows?” Wong says. “We’ve been building out our shopping capability, and shopping is the foundation of destination search, right? So it all comes down to building a great experience and a more robust shopping experience on Reddit in future.”
Reddit’s AI search gives users a combination of AI answers, which she says surface existing threads and conversations from Reddit, but are clearly labeled as AI answers. “I cite this area because as this AI surface of Reddit opens up, we don’t have ads on that page now, and it’s an interesting area for a shopping experience,” Wong says. “If you have a query like ‘What are the best running shoes?’ That’s a space we think about a lot for how user experience could be enhanced. Maybe they do want to see products. So I think avenues are opening for how we can enhance the user experience for Reddit Shop. Nothing specific to share yet, but absolutely something we’re thinking about.”
