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- [00:04]
A
Quick question. How many emails did your brand send last week that said the exact same thing to every single person on your list? If your answer is more than zero, then you're leaving money on the table. Instant looks at what each shopper actually did on your site, what they browsed, what they carded, what price point they were looking at, and sends that email to that specific person to see you're not using templates and it's not a generic. You forgot something. The actual right message for that actual person automatically. Brands like ThirdLove, Neuro and TRX are using Instant to drive three to five times more email revenue on a daily basis. Right now, you can get 50% off your first 60 days at instant one. Sharma. All right, everybody, welcome back to Limited Supply. I'm Nick Sharma and today we're going to do something that I've been wanting to do for a while. You know, almost every product search I've run in the last year ends with the word Reddit at the end of it. And, and I'm not alone. About 20% of Google results pull a Reddit thread. All the AI tools that you use, whether it's Chat or Perplexity or Gemini, when you ask them what to buy, they're usually citing Reddit threads back to you. And the most consequential commerce surface on the Internet is what a lot of DTC brands still think is just memes and karma. So today I'm sitting down with Vinay from Reddit and we're going to figure out exactly what changed and what's working for brands on the platform and how you can take advantage of Reddit right now, not someday, but today. So, Vinay, welcome. Really happy to have you on.
- [01:30]
B
Happy to be here, Nick. Thanks for having me.
- [01:32]
A
Of course. I think today's gonna be just a really cool episode because not only are we gonna talk about Reddit, which is a channel that everybody has kind of heard of and, you know, known, is a channel that has a lot of growth. But, you know, you're actually at Reddit and you're in it pretty deep. So I'm excited to hear from your perspective. But as we get started, could you just give our listeners a quick overview and introduction to yourself, maybe as if your. Your mom was bragging about you at a party. How would she introduce you?
- [02:02]
B
Sure, sure, sure. So my name is Vinay. I live in New York. I have been at dairy for four years. For the last two years, I've been leading a shopping and commerce product area which used to be primarily ads and now we're building a range of additional commerce experiences which we'll talk about. Before that, I was chief of staff to a CEO up until the ipo, which was an exciting, exciting time for Reddit. And before that, most of my career was in consulting, both in India and the US I love culture, communities and tech, and Reddit feels like the perfect spot to find all of those things in my day to day job.
- [02:38]
A
Yeah, it feels like that is the intersection, Reddit is the intersection of culture. You said culture, community and tech, right?
- [02:45]
B
Yep.
- [02:46]
A
Yeah, if that is totally that the pinnacle of Reddit. So, you know, Reddit has become now the kind of the Internet's, Internet's product research layer. And you know, it, it feels obvious to me, but it still feels like it's also underpriced by most people. Reddit as a channel, you know, it's where people go for basically a review of anything that matters to them. So whether it's running shoes or a humidifier for their child, or a new mattress they're about to, you know, go and make a purchase on, you know, no one is now reading the brand's website because that's just copy. And now it's more, more and more AI copy. But you know, they're going back and trying to find a Reddit thread from three years ago from someone who is completely unnamed and not an affiliate, not a real big profile or like a loud name, but they just want to hear that kind of like review. And that review is often, almost always just trusted way more than the brand. So I'm curious, like, when did this shift click internally? Like, was there a moment where you, you guys were looking at the data and you thought, oh wait, this is not just a community platform anymore, this is actually becoming a buying platform or a research layer.
- [03:56]
B
Yeah. So it's interesting. I think we've always believed this to be true at Reddit. Like so much of all the work that happens at Reddit is from people who believe in the value of communities. And we see that users come to Reddit because of the value of communities and what real humans have to say. And this predates AI by many years. Reddit is now 20ish years old. What AI has done, I think has accelerated a lot of the behaviors on the Internet and just made it much more central, meaning the utility of human content, authentic content has just become much more important. When the marginal cost to create content goes to zero, you can have an LLM, write a take, and so on, but if you're in the market for, as you said, a humidifier for a baby. What you want to hear from is from other parents. You want to hear what people bought and their experience and so on. You don't want to read a take from an AI from an LLM that is summarizing a set of humans and so on. So our thesis has always been that Reddit is the most human place on the Internet. Our CEO Steve Huffman often uses the language of Reddit as the town square. Right. It's like this is where people come to have conversations. This shows up in our numbers. Like we have a range of stats that show this. Like 9 in 10 redditors verify product recommendations from AI on Reddit before they buy. This is literally my. And I'm sure it's your workflow as well. If I'm in the market for something, I usually start with a Google search, perhaps figure out the lay of the land. And then before I make the purchase, I always like start with this product, Reddit appended, and then I enter the Reddit universe and decide what to buy. And this shows up in scale. Right? So we have north of 100 million daily users. A large fraction of them are commercial. So. So all of that is, I think, just testament to the fact that what people actually want is to hear from other humans.
- [05:45]
A
Right?
- [05:46]
B
And this becomes even more true in a world where there's a lot of LLM driven content floating around.
- [05:52]
A
Totally. And I'm curious too, like, what do you think makes Reddit so special from a format perspective that, you know, like other, other platforms have honest reviews or chatter and conversation, but Reddit is where everybody goes for this type of content and more. So trying to think of this answer as like a way to help frame the rest of the conversation as to why Reddit is kind of this playground.
- [06:15]
B
Yeah, I think the concept I talk about is like communities, right? So reviews, in some sense you could have a different review of a certain product depending on what community you're talking to or you're talking within. Right? So for example, like the cardinal example I use when testing any of our internal products is best headphones for swimming. You'll likely on Reddit have a swimmers community, you'll have a headphones community, you'll have a swimmers who listen to music community, and so on and so forth. And your review of a product is almost certainly going to be different depending on who you're talking to. Like, so much of understanding Reddit, which I always find amusing, is also like, it really helps to think about it as a, as a party and you're talking to a group of people and if everybody is there, says they're swimmers, the way you would describe a certain product is different from if you were talking to like an audio files group. Right. You'd likely talk about the fact that the sound quality is good. It is, doesn't interrupt how you swim and so on. So all of this comes back to communities. And I think what Reddit has is just a way for humans to interact online and for what this collection of humans decides is important to float to the top. And this, this comes because of moderators, this comes because of the community. Upward, downward interaction in terms of the feed is organized. But if you are on a certain community, you can almost always trust that the content that you see is likely community vetted. And from within a certain post, the comments that float up to the top is community vetted. And that is a signal that's really hard to emulate if you didn't have humans. In fact, with all of our collections of interests vetting content and giving it like a thumbs up that, hey, this is something that I found valuable.
- [07:59]
A
Yeah, that makes total sense. I think the, you know, like Reddit has kind of gone for, from just being a fun place of the Internet or a fun community on the Internet to where so many decisions actually get made. There's even like, you know, we're talking about consumer and commerce, but there's so many B2B subreddits and communities and threads also that are explosive. Like, you know, there's SaaS founder communities on Reddit that have some of the best advice you'd ever find on the Internet out there.
- [08:30]
B
A hundred percent. Like a friend of mine runs a fintech startup called Basic Capital. Highly recommend. And I think they found their first users and this company, what they do is something related to 401ks and finding ways to invest your 401k dollars better. And they found the first set of customers and got like excellent product feedback on Reddit. Right. I happen to focus on the commerce vertical, so I have a range of stats related to that. But anecdotally speaking, whether you're talking to a new parent or if you're talking to someone who's interested in vinyl records, or if you're talking to someone who likes bike packing, there is almost always a subreddit where communities of these people get together to discuss their hobby, vocation, interest, so to speak. And of course the purchasing decisions just fall as a consequence of that. To do stuff, you almost always need stuff and, and hence people Talk about the stuff that they need.
- [09:22]
A
Yeah, so true. I think, you know, I'm curious to find out like, what is, what is now driving so much of the growth on the commerce side, obviously there's the growth of AI, but you know, from the outside, the commerce business looks like it's grown a bunch in the last 18 months or so. There's a whole new, you know, community or mix of brands that have entered the platform. It's not just what you would have maybe thought were, you know, Reddit thought friendly brands from five, six years ago. And there's a bunch of D2C brands that are now starting to pay attention to Reddit also. And so I'm curious, like, what, what is behind this growth? Is it that brands are catching on? Are you guys building something to unlock that or building more tools for brands? Is it both?
- [10:05]
B
Yeah, I think it's both. So if you were to start at the first on the importance of Reddit as a platform itself, I think that has been something that's been true for, for many years now, accelerated by both external factors in terms of the value of authentic content going up in a AI slop world. And then the second, which is we're leaning into this trend. Right. So if you were to talk about the first, we see this in a range of stats so high intent shopping conversations are growing 40% year on year. That is faster than how the platform is growing overall. We just released earnings a few days ago and DAU grew 17% year on year. So the rate of growth of commercial content, of shopping content is growing faster than the rate of the growth of the platform itself. This is true across subcategories within shopping, whether you take consumer electronics, whether you take gaming and travel and so on. I think all of this comes down to like an individual user or a human, where there's a large number of shoppers who say that they feel more confident about a purchase. After researching on Reddit, I think of it as just a digital analog to a couple of friends told me this was a great product to buy and then I bought it. So I feel more confident that the product is good. It just so happens that these people are in friends and there are other humans you're interacting with on this platform called Reddit. So all of that is about just the secular role of like human content in Reddit in particular. But if you were to take in terms of the types of things that we're building, one of the products I work on is dynamic product tags and we'll talk about this later in the conversation. It's a standard product. Anybody who's been in marketing, I think, understands this product. But we're trying to build this in a way that is unique to Reddit. Right, where you have context and you have behavior, you have communities, but you can still track the user. If you spent like half an hour evaluating matrices. But now you're looking at news on Reddit, we still know that you were the same user that was looking at mattresses 30 minutes ago. So that's the behavioral side. And I'm happy to talk more about the types of things that were built to enable brands to show up to users who are in market or interested in a certain product.
- [12:10]
A
Yeah, totally. I guess before we get into that, is there, like, I'm curious, what surprised you in the last 12 months as more brands have also started to make their way to Reddit? Because I remember when I first started talking about Reddit marketing, It was probably 2015, 2016, and it was right around when dude wipes, actually, I think, was starting to get big on Reddit. And, you know, there was this guy that I knew from la, his name's Greg Barreth, and he was kind of known as, like, the Reddit guy that brands go to because he could pull off, he could find, like, influencers or talent and do some sort of a viral thing inside subreddit communities, which would get everybody talking about it and get it to trend to the top. But, you know, that obviously is so different from, like, the type of stuff we're talking about here and how Reddit advertising has shifted in general. But I'm curious. Yeah. Like, what has shocked you in the last 12 months or so?
- [13:04]
B
Yeah, I'd say a couple of things. One is just how niche the world is and just. Or rather, how many niches the world has. The more I talk to brands, the more I talk to retailers, products and categories that I never would have expected. Have a home on Reddit, turns out, have vibrant communities on Reddit. A friend has a daughter with a. With a certain genetic condition, and turns out there are a community of parents who talk about managing that condition. Right. Whether it's the pharmaceuticals part of it or whether it's the lifestyle part of it and all the products that are associated with doing that and managing that condition. I think I continue to be surprised, and it's really fun because I've been at this company now for four years, and I'm still discovering facets to what Reddit can mean to people in ways that I didn't know before. So that's a little bit about the platform, but in terms of what has surprised me about the product, it is remarkable how fast you can improve a product when you have a small group of people who are passionate, who have done this before, who are trying to then shape a product in Reddit's image, so to speak. But also with like the power of LLMs and modern AI tools, things like having a product knowledge graph, things like post understanding, things like product understanding. Simply having access to LLMs allows us to do things at scale that maybe 10 years ago we would have needed armies of labelers and people to do, that we now can do in a couple of weeks. And that I think is like the under spoken about backdrop to all of the product improvements that we've been spending time on.
- [14:42]
A
Yeah, it's so cool to hear that because like so behind me I have 4 Mac minis all set up as open clause.
- [14:49]
B
So you're the person who's like leading to all of the stock outs on Apple.
- [14:52]
A
Exactly. It's people like me. But you know, I've like, I've used it to completely change my life from whether it's small side projects I have going on where each agent has, is like a GM of a brand and knows everything about it, is listening to all those call recordings, those emails, et cetera, learning separate skills specifically for that. And I know it's, it's starting to happen. Like Brex for example, you know, has announced on Twitter a few weeks ago that they use every, I think employee is paired with an open claw so they can get a ton more stuff done, for example. But it's so cool to hear that even a company like Reddit is starting to take advantage of this and you know, it's allowing people to just ship way faster.
- [15:34]
B
No, a hundred percent. Like so much of my time goes into both using it myself and figuring out things that would have taken me twice as long that I can now do in half the time. And both like things that in a world where I'd have to do it myself now there are like almost new use cases being unlocked. This shows up in our product building. So for example, something we'll talk about later is deciding what subreddits a brand needs to know about.
- [16:00]
A
Right.
- [16:00]
B
And the thing about subreddit nomenclature, it's like it's really hard to figure out for a lay user the best news and like pop culture subreddit that I follow is called Fa Fa Moi. So f a u x moi 0 chance that if you didn't know what you were looking for that you would, like, find the subreddit. But the thing is, like, for a model to know this, for an agent to figure out that, hey, this user is entered with this type of content, and this subreddit has the type of content that is useful to them, that is much easier than for a human to look at the text and figure it out. So things like that were able to solve a lot of problems that would have been much harder to solve with agents. So despite Reddit being, what, 2,000 people strong, we're able to accelerate our roadmap much more than I would have expected 18 months ago or 24 months ago.
- [16:46]
A
Totally amazing. And so I want to hear a little bit more about product stuff, so walk me through some of the new stuff. So you have catalog ads, you've got the Shopify integration, there's community overlays, contextual targeting. Now, you know, for a brand that's listening and thinking, I took a look at Reddit, I, you know, maybe even brought an agency on to take a look at it, or I've wanted to take a look at it. You know, what are the things they should know about? What is different now?
- [17:13]
B
Yeah, I think from my conversations with brands, everybody has attempted to participate in the Reddit conversation, whether it's paid or organic or some point. Usually I can predict their opinion based on asking them at what point they attempted this first. I say this to say that this platform is developing and adapting rapidly. Like Reddit ads today versus Reddit ads 12 months ago or 48 months ago is like dramatically different. The types of things the product I lead is dynamic product ads. The types of things that excite me is our performance stack is getting dramatically better. In the last one year, we've shipped launches that increased ROAS 91%. So close to double. And we still feel like we're scratching at the top of the surface. Like, there is so much left to do. And I can talk through the types of things we're thinking about in terms of formats. Like, for the longest time, the only format we had was like a standard vanilla product carousel. Someone we both know. So Dan Patelo at Marpipe, someone we're working with to make these formats more attractive, more engaging, and so on. We're building stuff first party. So, for example, we know that let's take the Bose QC35 is a product that is disproportionately purchased by Redditors. It is now possible for us to add a sticker on top of that product image to, to say that hey, this is popular with Redditors, for example. Right. And I use that as an example. But the same sentiment is true across many other products in many other categories. Collection ads and the theme of like making things that are Reddit unique, I think is what keeps up us, keeps us up at night. DPA has existed for a while. Meta's had DPA for a while. Google's had DPA for a while. So if we're coming into this conversation a couple of years after, what does it mean to create dynamic product ads in a way that is feels native to Reddit and the fact that there are these distinct communities and humans talking about products. So those are the types of products that I'm excited by if you were to look into the next year and so on, the broad themes, if I were to stay, stay, stay far from the specifics, but the themes are contextual relevance and behavioral relevance. How do you get an ad to be relevant to Nick on when Nick is on this community at this point in time? And that ad should be different from Nick on this other community two days later. Right. So the intersection of like, behavioral, like, what Nick is interested in, and contextual in terms of like what subreddit Nick is on, I think that's a little bit like the art of the technical problems that we're trying to solve.
- [19:50]
A
I guess these are all tools, right? Like the community overlays, the Shopify integration. But are there a set of tools on top of that allow a Reddit marketer to use these together or individually at a higher capacity?
- [20:04]
B
Yeah. So a couple of things. One is dynamic product ads is heavily automated. Like so much of the automation was driven by the perspective that it is easier for us as Reddit Inc. To understand the plethora of communities that are available and ensure that impressions show up at the right community to the right user at the right time. So as a consequence, DPA on Reddit is as simple as you plug in your catalog, you give a signal, so that's pixel or capi. And now with the Shopify integration, that becomes much easier and close to one click and then we will find the most valuable impressions for you.
- [20:38]
A
Right.
- [20:39]
B
So that's the automation part of it versus a marketer trying to figure out, hey, what are the top five subreddits or interests that they want to target? All of that is possible as well on Reddit. Like you could do that. But the spirit of automation, with some of our recent launches on Reddit, Max and dpa, the spirit is to take some of that, the judgment and the burden of thinking from the marketer onto the platform and do hopefully a better job. That said, insights is a big, big thing that I keep thinking about, like a lot of it is also translating these millions of conversations that are happening every day into actionable insights for marketers. So right now we have this product called Reddit Pro. So if you're a brand, if you're a DTC brand and you're trying to figure out, hey, I want to know conversations, let's say you're a DTC brand on like a certain kind of seasoning for cooking. What are people talking about in terms of seasoning on Reddit? Let's say you make a certain kind of vegan seasoning. What is the vegan community talking about on Reddit? What are the top brands that they're talking about on Reddit? Reddit Pro is a product which is intended to be a free product. Think of it as a home for a brand on Reddit, right? So you create a you brand and you get access to insights about your product category and so on. The advantage of this is that the same use ends up being your username that is used to push ads on Reddit, right? So it's all coming from the same home. But I see all of this as like the first of a long journey in terms of insights, like actionable insights. The types of things that I like to enable for brands is, hey, vegan seasoning is trending this month on credit on these five communities. Like start a campaign to target these users, right? Like something actionable like that. We're probably a few quarters out, but that's the directionally the types of things we're thinking about.
- [22:29]
A
Amazing. And. Well, first of all, Reddit Pro is so cool. I've never heard of that being a available tool, but I think that's sick because it sounds like it's a little bit like trends in a way, but, you know, a much more deeper understanding because Reddit holds all that conversation and all the, you know, upvote down vote sentiment, et cetera, a hundred percent.
- [22:52]
B
I'm happy to send you a couple of Reddit Pro links so you can add it to the show notes. But Reddit Pro is a really cool product and I think really valuable. Like the mental model is so much of the Internet and large companies usually started with an organic presence for brands first and then kicked off a paid business, right? So on Google Maps you had businesses show up and then a way for them to get more distribution is via Google Ads on Maps for Reddit it was a little bit the inverse. Like we built out this sophisticated ads platform, but there were pockets of businesses using Reddit either in their own communities or to participate in larger communities. And Reddit Pro is a product to make that easier.
- [23:32]
A
Right.
- [23:32]
B
So publishers are using this, brands are using this, and it's still in its early days, so there's a lot that needs to be built. But I think it's like a great product for brands to use to access conversations and humans on Reddit.
- [23:44]
A
Yeah, fully agreed. Time for the retention tip of the week brought to you by Instant. Here's a benchmark I use when I audit brands. What percentage of your total email revenue comes from triggered flows versus campaigns? If you're below 50% on flows, you're over relying on batch sends and promotions. If you're at 70% or above from flows, you're in a great position. Now why does this matter? Campaigns go out when you send them, not when the shopper is ready. And they're one to many. And they train your list to wait for discounts. Triggered flows on the other hand are one to one. They fire based on behavior. Someone abandons the cart, they browse a new category, they hit the purchase anniversary, they become inactive, they're more relevant and they convert higher as a result. And they don't require you to constantly produce new content. The brands I see winning at retention have deep flow architecture, not just a welcome and an abandoned cart. I'm talking browse abandonment by category, post purchase by product type, win back sequences by purchase frequency, VIP milestone triggers, price drop alerts back in stock notifications, layered flows that cover the full customer life cycle cycle. If building all that sounds overwhelming, instance AI does that for you. They generate hyper personalized flows that trigger in real time behavior and they're live within minutes, not months. And if you want to make campaigns as dynamic as your flows, Instant can do that too. Head to Instant1Sharma okay, I'd love to move to the creative piece. So you know creative is I think a piece that so many brands get completely wrong. One in general across most platforms, you know they try to show up way too polished and very produced. But Reddit is actually a place where it polished and produced does not land at all. And you know as a result they they'll say oh Reddit doesn't work for us. Our audience is not on Reddit. Which is so false. But the issue isn't here that really the platform it's the polish is it's kind of like the wrong language or the wrong accent to speak in on the Reddit platform. So, you know, I'm curious, like, why does polish die on Reddit and what is it about the platform that punishes that style? It's also very similar to some of the short form platforms where if you run polished ads, you almost get scrutiny for it.
- [25:58]
B
Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right. And I love your metaphor for it. Like it's the wrong accent. I think on some abstract level the same content is helpful, but it's about how you say it and how you show up. Reddit is a, is a community of people, right? Like this is people at a party. If you imagine someone showing up and it looked like they were marketing their product and only talking about the pros and it felt inauthentic, you would imagine that conversation petering out. Right. So the same metaphor I think applies to Reddit. Reddit's users are really good at sniffing out inauthentic content and downvoting it. There are so many examples, some like infamous in Reddit in terms of people trying to gain distribution by being inauthentic and the platform or the community sniffing it out. I'd say the best advice is like, be a human, right? Try and be as authentic as possible. So it's a different muscle, so to speak. It's like a different. It's about adding value, being authentic to a community.
- [26:55]
A
Do you have any examples that come to mind?
- [26:57]
B
Yeah. So you have a couple of brands like Canada Goose and Walmart that found ways to be authentic to their community. The types of things that are helpful are if you pull like search terms for the brand, like what are people like, what are humans like? There exists an opinion of things that people are talking about the brand. That is true. It could be that people are googling reliability or longevity about a certain brand, which means that that's the conversation people are having. And your obligation as a brand is to talk or to participate in that conversation. So leaning into that to talk about reliability and longevity I think is one theme, right?
- [27:34]
A
Yeah.
- [27:34]
B
Making it sound casual and human I think is another part. So a lot of brands try using like Reddit lingo like iykyk or like til and so on. And that helps as well. It's a little trying to have it be, not be the scary like brand incorporated. But hey, this brand is composed of humans who are trying to make a product for other humans to use and like leaning into that muscle more. I mean, it's a sad truth that this isn't like the natural tendency on the Internet, but I think Revit sniffs this out really well. The last thing that I personally find really helpful is like first person framing works. Like if you say that like this user found value or I found value with this product, and I think you might as well, and if that's true that it doesn't feel like it's a marketer making something up, that also works well.
- [28:24]
A
Yeah, Reddit has a really good filter of sniffing out the bullshit basically. And communities I think do a really good job keeping out things that feel non value based. So when you're talking like if a brand were to go and start to, you know, write or post or create, do you find that it's often better to have a lot of this coming from the brand? Or it's more so better to try to build and facilitate a community on Reddit or facilitate conversation, but not be the one going in and responding as the brand about, you know, the best running shoes or best mattress or something like that.
- [29:02]
B
Yeah, I would say the way to think about it is there already exist communities where people are talking about a range of products. This brands, hypothetical brands, products included. And I think the game is about participating in that conversation versus starting a new conversation. So if people are talking about your products and a certain community using Reddit Pro as a way to participate in that conversation in the spirit of being helpful. Right, like sharing a certain artifact about the product or about a certain misrepresentation about the product as a way to be helpful and participate in the conversation, that works. What also works is ads that intend to communicate something about your product to a set of communities. And our ad stack will ensure that these ads show up in context or behaviorally relevant to a certain user. So it ends up with the same outcome, but it allows you to a little bit like spray your message on a broader palette. So those are ways that help starting communities are possible. Certain brands find it helpful. It's just a really hard thing to do. It's almost like you're trying to create a group of people talking to each other while there exists a larger conversation. So if you were to take say skincare, R Skincare addiction has millions of people talking about skincare. And this is an established community of people, people show up every day, et cetera. It is in a brand's interest to try and be helpful in that conversation versus starting a different community of people talking about something else.
- [30:38]
A
Right. And yeah, I guess like in that example too, with something like R skincare addiction, do you think there's opportunities for brands to participate in Both an organic and a paid capacity there.
- [30:54]
B
Yeah, 100%. In fact, I would say the paid capacity is probably a more efficient way to access different pockets of subreddits and conversations on Reddit and use that as learnings to decide where to perhaps participate in organically. Like, there was a phase where I think I also have empathy for brands. It's hard to figure out which community or which subreddit to participate in. You have limited time, you have 20 things to do. I think ad serves that need. And a little bit of how we see our ads product is the better we make our ad stack, the more easier it is for brands to show up in the right conversation at the right time to the right user. So we're kind of taking that burden off of brands.
- [31:35]
A
Totally.
- [31:37]
B
Yeah.
- [31:37]
A
And could you also just touch a little bit on mods? Like, what's the right way to deal with moderators as a brand here? Because I feel like brands do get probably removed from communities more than the average person or like individual user.
- [31:49]
B
Yeah. So I think there's a couple of levels of moderation, right? So one is like moderation at the platform level, right? Like certain kinds of offensive content or illegal content and so on are moderated at the platform level, communities then have their own rules and subcultures that they follow that the mods in some sense implement or ensure that the community is following. And then there's the third level of moderation, which is by the humans in the community, which is upvoting and downvoting in some sense, a comment that a mod approves, the platform approves, but nobody sees because it hasn't been upvoted enough is unhelpful content. But it passed the first two filters. Right? So the way I think about moderators is they play an important role in the Reddit conversation. They are one of multiple levels of filtering to ensure that as a human, if you open a bar, skincare addiction, you see content that is helpful to you. I think the important thing for brands to know is figure out what a community is about. What is a community talking about? So you have skincare addiction, but you also have skincare subreddits for skin, a certain type of skin tones. You have like South Asian skin care communities and black skin care communities. So if you were to talk about a product that is irrelevant to those communities, I can imagine either the moderator taking that post down or not allowing that content, or maybe it passes that filter. But the community, it doesn't resonate with the community. So the outcome is in effect the same. So I think using that lens of try and be helpful to the conversation and valuable to the conversation that's happening will help pass whatever filters that are in the works, whether it's moderators or the humans themselves.
- [33:30]
A
Yeah, makes total sense. So now talking about, you know, kind of, I think the piece that scares most marketers or maybe even people approving the budget, which is measurement, you know, attribution is where I think it gets a little murky because Reddit is not a traditional, you know, last click bottom of the funnel conversion focused ad platform. Right. And so I feel like a lot of times marketers, they don't see that and they just bail. They just think it's, it's not the right platform for them anymore. But I'm curious, I know you guys are working on this, obviously with the growth of the commerce products, the catalog ads, et cetera, how are you guys thinking about things like conversion tracking and what brands should be measuring or how should they approach conversion tracking on Reddit?
- [34:16]
B
Yep. Yeah, so I think, I think that is, that is definitely true and I've heard some of your other episodes. The point of last click comes up fairly often. Reddit is a fundamentally a discovery and a consideration platform. If you look at the user's purchase journey, where Reddit shows up is when they're making the decision of either what to buy, so you're like fairly upper funnel or you have a problem and should I buy something? So you're like that far up the funnel all the way down to. Yeah, I have two candidates, X and Y. Which one should I buy? Right. So it's like it goes all the way down there. But we so far have not been the last qlik platform. So what that means from a marketer standpoint, that last click misses a lot of the richness of the value of Reddit. In terms of like our product capabilities, we allow users to optimize or market us to optimize either for a 7.0 or a 7:1. Right. So fairly standard. So either ticks only or clicks plus views, but you give seven day clicks and one day views. So that's in terms of optimization and in terms of measurement, you could choose whatever window you like to interpret results. But if I were to say, or share advice to brands as they start spending on Reddit, only a small fraction of Reddit's revenue credit is factored by last click. And there is a lot of research online, most recently by phosphor. If you look at the state of retail commerce in 2026, like I think they make the same point with hard numbers. A small fraction of Reddit's credit shows up in last click. I think in that particular study, Reddit showed up as the most undervalued channel in the mix in a certain set of campaigns. The funny thing to me is with many of the brands that, and retailers that we work with today, people who use Reddit, I think, intuitively have a grasp for it. If you use Reddit in your purchase, you kind of know that, hey, this isn't the place that I should use. Lastly, there is something broader here. And then there's like, many ways to measure that, right? Expanding attribution windows or doing incrementality studies or using an MTA analysis and so on. But starting with that premise of this is a certain kind of platform that users use a certain kind of way. And the hammers that I have, that is the last click hammer may not be the right tool to use to understand the value of this platform. So to someone who hasn't used Reddit, that's what I'd say.
- [36:37]
A
Yeah, yeah, totally agreed. I even think, like, you know, for when people are kind of like, what you were saying, like, Reddit users will probably understand how to use the platform really well. I always find it interesting when brands try to test a new channel and the person who's, like, leading the test has never, you know, is not an intuitive user of that platform. It's like, you know, a beverage company trying to go sponsor Hyrox, like a really niche fitness competition, but has no context on Hyrocks or what their athletes are doing or what they might be using to train or all that kind of stuff. And I think it's a very similar approach when, you know, a marketer decides to go test a platform, they've never really done anything. They kind of just think, all right, let me put ten grand in. You know, think what I put out, what I think is a good or decent creative, and let it run and see what happens. And then the other thing is, you know, to your point, you were saying, like, super high up the funnel, upper funnel and lower funnel. I also think Reddit plays huge in the middle funnel. Once somebody hears about the brand and they want to go actually see, is this legit? They start reading the brand's landing page and see a review that catches their eye. Maybe then they read it and it's, it's a very, It's. It's very rare that platforms are often like, full funnel like that. But, you know, it. It also, like, doesn't account for a lot of the stuff you that that's like, you know, maybe happening, that's untracked. Like there was always this example when I worked at Hint that our COO used to say and he would say, you know, how could you quantify that SEO is not working for us? Because one day the producer of Good Morning America is going to bring our product on the show because they googled something and led to the product being DS100. You know what I mean? And I feel like so much of that is similar here. Like you can't really look at Last Click Roas and decide Reddit like you almost need and you can't really even just look at an incrementality study because you might find that like a Reddit, a Reddit, you know, a piece of Reddit content helps you a few months later as well. It may not be like, you know, another video platform where you're running an eight week holdout or something to see the results. But yeah, it's just all fascinating because you, you. It's hard to quantify. But Reddit is also something where if you can get it right and get in the culture, it can be such a big accelerant for the entire brand
- [38:53]
B
as a whole, 100%. And measurement is an art. So much of measurement is there exists some ground truth, which is how users shop and measurement is trying to figure out an attribution is trying to figure out who gets how much credit. So there exists a pie that you need to slice up. But I think if you look at the full set of facts, I think it is very, very true that Reddit shows up in the purchase funnel for a lot of users and figuring out how best to account for that, there's a range of ways to do it. I think what is certainly true is Last Click misses out so much of the richness of how users actually shop.
- [39:30]
A
Totally. I'm curious if there's like one metric you would or one signal even you would recommend that a brand is tracking to see if Reddit is working for them. What would that be?
- [39:43]
B
It's a great question. I think I would probably look at roas and I would include views and I would look at maybe a 1v7C or something of the sort for their paid spend. I think that is something that feels balanced, that accounts for the way Reddit is used in a user's purchase journey, but also weights towards what brands care about, which is sales and revenue. And if I were to talk about a brand that isn't spending on Reddit yet if you were to simply Google your brand name and Reddit and if you look at the types of conversations that show up and if you see that there are both recent conversations and old conversations. Right. That's like a great tell as to if people are consistently using this platform to talk about my products. And this is if this is where my users or my customers are, this is probably where I should be as a brand as well.
- [40:35]
A
Yeah. So I'm curious now today, you know, it's May 5th in 2026, why do you think, you know, there's a strategic opportunity for brands trying to test Reddit now? And do you think there's a window of opportunity here for brands to jump on?
- [40:54]
B
Yeah, I really think so. I feel like Reddit dynamic product ads went to GA on Reddit a year ago. Right. So we're, all things considered, very new to this. The product now is unrecognizable versus the product we had a year ago or even two years ago. Now feels like a good time to test the platform. We have a range of new products that will make the whole add by field Reddit unique. Improved reporting with Shopify for mid market brands and SMB brands. It's now going to be much simpler to onboard. So so much of DPA is also an extremely high effort to get set up because you need to set up the catalog and make sure the catalog is clean and then ensure that your signal is flowing properly and your Pixel shows up on each of your product pages. But all of that legwork goes away if you can just like one or two clicks like get your Shopify pixel and Shopify catalog ingested into Edict. So the ease of testing is also low. We have an excellent sales team and a lot of good collateral to make sure that your dollars are spent spent well. So I'm really excited we're still at the start. Like, I think if I had to share one thing, it would probably be that in this world of like AI generated content and users trying to figure out this new Internet, finding a space on the Internet that is largely entirely human and participating in conversations with other humans is going to become an increasingly scarce commodity. So you could make the case that Reddit is underpriced in the grander conversation of the Internet and now is a good time to participate.
- [42:30]
A
Amazing. That was going to be my final question, which is what's the one thing you wish more brands understood about what they're missing out on from Reddit? And I think that's a perfect way to put it is like this is a gated, human only interactive community on the Internet where, you know, everything is pretty real and there's not, you know, nothing here is fake or planted.
- [42:53]
B
100%. Yeah. And if anything is fake or planted, communities figure it out. So it's a good place to be. It's a place to be that will feel different from trying to gain distribution on other parts of the Internet. But I think that is like a function of why Reddit is so different from a lot of pockets of the Internet.
- [43:12]
A
Totally. Yeah.
- [43:13]
B
I'm excited for more brands like we work with many household name brands and retailers who are all finding product market fit and finding users and potential customers on Reddit across categories. So this is a good time to test.
- [43:28]
A
Amazing. Well before we head out, where can people find you if they want to get in touch? Where should they head if they want to, you know, learn more about Reddit or. Or Reddit Pro.
- [43:38]
B
Yeah. So for Reddit Pro Reddit Reddit Inc. Has a range of articles on and how to guides as to how to get acquainted with the platform to set up a dynamic product ads campaign to set up a Reddit Pro account. And I'm happy to share some links so we can add it to the show notes if that's possible. Nick to find me, my name is Vineshridhar. I'm not super online but I'll share my LinkedIn so folks can find me as well. Commerce is such a big part of Reddit, like shopping on Reddit is so big. So helping brands interact with their customers and prospective customers is like a big reason why we all show up to work. So excited to excited to be here and thanks for the conversation Nick.
- [44:17]
A
Amazing. Thanks for coming on and just sharing everything you know about Reddit.
- [44:22]
B
Of course, yeah. Have a good day. Thank you.
- [44:25]
A
Thanks Vinay. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next time to cut through the noise on CPG retail and E commerce. If you enjoyed this episode, why not share it with a friend and be sure to subscribe wherever you listen so you don't miss the next one.