Reddit — now a publicly traded company with more control over revenue growth — is putting a lot of emphasis on strengthening its international audience, starting with French speakers. In their first earnings call, CEO Steve Huffman confirmed that the company is now working on automatic, real-time translations of website content into French, thanks to advances in large language models.
It also touched on expanding the ecosystem with a few twists. It wants to entice developers with new tools — a surprise given the company’s history on that front. and is planning a re-introduction of Reddit Gold — another surprise considering the company ended its virtual currency efforts less than a year ago.
Moves like these foreshadow what the future, not the present, might look like for Reddit. Today, his news is relatively encouraging, with Reddit’s revenue last quarter up 48% year over year to $243 million and unique users up 37% to 82.7 million. (This number includes both online and offline users, similar to how Twitter—now called X—measured its audience when it was public.)
User development and translation
Huffman, speaking on the earnings call, said that half of Reddit’s audience is based in the US, indicating that the company is putting more emphasis on how to grow its international share.
“We’re still 50/50 US versus non-US, but our peers are more like 80% to 90% non-US,” he said. “I think there’s a huge opportunity there.” He went on to describe machine translation with artificial intelligence as “one of the big unlocks for us in the short to medium term.”
“So we are translating our entire corpus today which is mainly in English into the other languages and hopefully that will help accelerate international growth,” he said.
The site-wide translation effort is still a test, in his words, though there are plenty of resources available for it. Huffman noted that this content is also indexed in Google’s French-language results, driving more traffic to the site, and the company wants to tackle Spanish next.
Reddit has been offering meta-based translation since last year with support for eight languages.
Developer Tools
It was surreal to hear Huffman talk about developer tools on the call. It wasn’t until July 2023 that the company found itself in a massive standoff with third-party developer clients over API changes — resulting in the shutdown of hundreds of subreddits in protest of the API changes.
Now the social network is in play-nice mode. Huffman said there are plans for tools that could “break the boundaries of what a subreddit can be.” He gave examples of some of the experiments underway, including 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 aims to add more developers from the waitlist this summer and enable monetization features later this year.
Other announcements
Earlier this year, Reddit signed on agreement with Google to allow the search engine company to use the social network 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 in many cases controversial in light of the fact that users may not want their data to be used for, say, AI training or some other common purposes these days. For what it’s worth, Huffman, you might have guessed, insisted that the company is “consistent and selective” in how it chooses partners.
The name of the game for the company right now is building more infrastructure to generate revenue. So, while gold and another currency effort, blockchain-based Community Points, were both canned last year, the virtual currency is set to get another exposure on the platform because it represents an opportunity for Reddit to diversify its business model. During the earnings call, the company noted that it plans to launch a “refreshed” Gold product, with programs for 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 making moves to capitalize on these means of growth.
