Reddit Should Avoid Short-Video
Kavin Stewart, Partner at Tribe Capital, on Reddit's 10x opportunity
This is why a Reddit move into TikTok style video was unlikely to create durable advantage. Meta has a long record of taking fast growing social formats, shipping them into Instagram and Facebook, and then using its larger ad stack and distribution to scale them fast. Reddit can add video, but its stronger position is in niche communities, deep discussion, and high intent conversations that are harder for a copycat feed to replace.
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Meta launched Instagram Reels in August 2020 as a dedicated short video product inside Instagram, then expanded Reels placement and discovery across the app. That is the practical meaning of being a copying machine, taking a proven behavior and plugging it into an app with massive existing reach.
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Reddit monetizes very differently from a pure short video app. Its ad business is built around people gathering in subreddits like product advice, hobbies, and local communities, where posts and comments reveal what they care about and often what they plan to buy. That commercial intent is more like search than entertainment scrolling.
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The numbers show how much headroom Reddit had without needing to win the TikTok game. Reddit generated about $510M in 2022 on roughly 430M MAUs, far below Facebook and Instagram on revenue per user. The easier path was improving monetization of existing discussion demand, not trying to out execute Meta on short video distribution.
Going forward, the winning version of Reddit looks more like a better organizer and recommender of community knowledge than another endless short video feed. The bigger opportunity is to package its posts and comments into more personalized, easier to consume formats while keeping the underlying social graph of subreddits and expert discussion intact.