Reddit second to TikTok in ad growth
Reddit’s 2022 ad momentum showed that buyers were treating it less like a quirky forum and more like a real performance channel with scarce intent rich inventory. Advertisers were still cutting budgets across digital, but Reddit kept taking share because people use it when they are researching what to buy, what to try, or how to solve a problem, which makes a sponsored post inside the right subreddit feel closer to search than to broad social branding.
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Reddit’s ad business was already the core of monetization in 2022, about 93% of revenue, with sponsored posts sold into specific communities. That matters because an ad in r running, r skincare, or r gaming reaches users who have already sorted themselves by interest, which raises conversion odds without needing Facebook level identity data.
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TikTok grew faster because its algorithm can create massive new impressions from almost any video and then optimize delivery at huge scale. Reddit grew from a different strength. It captures explicit discussion and recommendation behavior, which former product leadership described as commercial intent that sits between Facebook and Google in advertiser value.
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The gap in monetization was still enormous. Reddit generated about $1.19 of annual revenue per MAU in 2022, versus roughly $35 for Instagram, $45 for Facebook, about $10 for Twitter, and about $6 for Snapchat. So strong ad spend growth on Reddit was less about saturation and more about a small base starting to monetize a valuable audience.
Going forward, Reddit’s upside comes from turning more of its discussion data into better ranked feeds, sharper ad targeting, and more measurable buying intent. If it keeps moving subreddit conversations into something that is easier for advertisers to target and easier for users to discover, it can keep growing faster than mature social peers even without matching TikTok’s scale.