Reddit: India now a focus market for Reddit, says CEO Steve Huffman

Whether it’s about Infosys’ delay in disbursing offer letters to freshers it hired in 2022 or fans drooling over Shahrukh Khan on his 59th birthday, Indians have found a new destination for social media chatter – Reddit.

Views among Redditors in India have grown 59% on year, said Reddit cofounder and chief executive Steve Huffman who now counts India as one of its focus markets.

Reddit registered an India subsidiary in August this year and started leveraging the influencer connect to gather users – it hosted AMA (ask me anything) sessions with Shark Tank’s Namita Thapar and actors Pankaj Tripathi and Manoj Bajpayee.

The online community platform surprised Wall Street with its third quarter earnings last week by turning profitable for the first time in 19 years of its existence, thanks to its content licensing deals with AI companies Google and OpenAI, which fetched it a revenue of $33.2 million. Reddit recorded 97.2 million daily active users (DAUs) in the quarter ended September, an all-time high and an increase of 47% year over year.

Consequently. Reddit’s shares soared 40% intra-day. The social media company, which got listed on the NYSE in March this year, has tripled its valuation to $18.74 billion within nine months.

The stupendous growth is driven by AI and machine translation of posts in different languages, Huffman said. “Based on the success we’ve seen so far, we plan to expand machine translation to over 30 countries through 2025,” he said.

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In a letter to the company’s shareholders last week, he said the company is successfully growing beyond the US. “International DAU grew 44% year over year, led by 53% growth in our focus markets, most notably in France, India, and the Philippines,” the CEO said.Rohit Agarwal, founder and director of marketing agency Alpha Zegus, said, “Online community culture isn’t deep-rooted in India, unlike geographies like the US where a group of Redditors one day decided to drive down the stock price of Gamestop and literally brought America’s top hedge funds to their knees.”

He said Indian audiences are hooked to short-form video content with a low attention span. “And that’s why all brands want to advertise with Instagram and YouTube. Deeper engagement platforms like Reddit may find some advertising interest from focussed companies like those in tech,” Agarwal said.

Among Indian Redditors, topics like entertainment, travel, news and education, technology, gaming, sports, family and relationships are the most popular. Subreddit communities like r/BollyBlindsNGossip, r/bangalore, r/BITSPilani, r/MumbaiIndians and r/developersindia have amassed between 700,000 to 1.5 million members.

The company is doubling down on optimising culturally relevant and local experiences for Redditors in India.

Most recently, the platform launched a diya collection festive reward programme, a gamification strategy that has been hugely successful for growing the number of transactions for Google Pay.

Reddit declined ET’s request for official comment.

The US has always been the top market for Reddit, accounting for half of its DAUs and the largest ARPU (average revenue per unique).

Reddit’s popularity has far surpassed rival platform Quora, which had 400 million monthly active users as of August 2024. Although both platforms are different, there are some crossovers. Reddit is a content curation platform while Quora focuses on questions and answers.

AMA sessions are increasingly becoming popular on Reddit, having grown fivefold.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, did an AMA with his team last week when he launched the ChatGPT Search.

Altman was among the first investors to lead a $50-million funding round in Reddit in 2014.

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