Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. Steve Huffman, of course, his co founder and CEO of Reddit. He joins us here live at the Bloomberg Tech Conference earlier this week. I was covering your earnings and the first earnings that you guys had as a publicly traded company.
You guys just knocked out.
Of the park. We had a nice quarter. We're happy with it.
Revenue forty eight percent, users thirty seven percent. I think it's a great way to start, and I think we're pretty happy.
What was it that worked well for you for the quarter?
Well, look the way I've been describing the folks as our work is working. And so this has been really a multi year effort of making and Reddit like it's easy to say, it's easier to use, faster, easier to sign up, easier to find your home, and it's paying off.
We should know when you stay multi year, you don't just mean like a couple of years. I mean, Reddit is like a company that is almost as old as as Facebook focus.
Point, and it was a much longer path year in ibo So.
We started the company in two thousand and five, I mean, and we've had a journey.
We sold the company and spun out. I left, I came back.
I'd say, really the kind of modern era of Reddit started at twenty fifteen, that's when I came back, But it was really a couple of years ago where I told the company. I was like, we need to but being so academic about our work and just make credit better, just focus on quality.
Well, so how talk to a little bit about how you do and continue to make it better. There was a quote I think on the earnings about you say, building the next generation of Reddit. So how do you think about that? Steam in a world where we are talking a lot about AI.
We know of the data that you guys have.
On your platforms, it's smart data, it's targeted data.
What is the next generation of Reddit? What does that really mean? So?
Reddit is people, right, people create community that have incredible conversations. So really what we're doing is revealing that now as it happens. People are users, but any people really they have I think a deep down need or community and a sense of belonging, and that's what we provide now.
At the same time as conversations.
They're having are totally unique on the Internet where increasingly more and more content online is written by AI, is written by machines. There's a premium now on content that's made by humans or it comes from humans, and I think people have a craving increasingly through that realness as well.
I'm wondering about the content policy that you guys rolled out today, because the whole idea here is to create a place for Reddit content to actually help train AI models. So you have a deal right now out there with Alphabet's Google to help it train its AI models. What works about Reddit's content and how do you balance that with making sure that the people who contribute there feel like they're not contributing to developing an AI algorithm.
So Reddit has been open for a long time, and we love that about Reddit, and we've been very well indexed in search and Google Search for example, and I think of AI the AIS that we see as like search two point zero, and so it's important for us or we like Reddit being out there and our content being out there. It helps users find their home on Reddit, it helps people get answers to questions. I think this is very powerful. But what we announced this morning is
that we can't just be completely permissive. We have to be very picky about who we work with, and we're gonna work with partners like Google who will do so on our terms, right, not reverse engineer the identity of our users, not try to use public content and Reddit to target ads or things like that, but really use it for what it's attended for. It's just advancing the state of the art and helping people find their home on Reddit.
It does feel like we're.
Going into a new generation, maybe a more informed generation, if you will, when it comes to this social media world. Is that fair after seeing some of the stumbles of kind of the first round, if you will.
So, the way I think about this ecosystemic and I'm.
Not just saying Reddit, I'm just talking about broadly social media.
Well, so Reddit, remember we started in two thousand and five, so we actually pre date the word social media and the idea of influence.
There was a time when that happened.
Yeah, And so I feel like we're kind of going through this this evolution where Reddit's becoming more mainstream and increasingly people who maybe have grown up with social media are seeing that hey, there's another way, and this might be a better way or a better fit for them. Right, Because Reddit is free of a lot of the I think incentives or misincentives that calls people to behave unnaturally. Like on Reddit, people just help each other and you don't get credit for it in real life.
So the only reason you do it is.
Because you enjoy doing it, and I think that's really special.
Yeah, I feel like I'm actually so late to the party. I've talked about this, talked about I can't tell you what time he talks about it. I'm not a young person, and like, I basically feel like I just discovered Reddit and it's probably the platform that I spend the most time on. It has communities for you know, I'm a cyclist. I live in a certain part of New York. Like I can follow all of these communities and it's like it's super helpful too, with like home improvement stuff.
I'm finding it.
How do you get more people like me to find it? Sort of later in there.
Hey, you're doing your part. But I feel like like.
My brothers are like, yeah, this has been around.
Okay.
So this is the funny thing about our demographics that we're actually what we're seeing as people age out or social media and they age into reading, and so it's kind of pick people up. You know, we call them a merging adults EVE in their early twenties, late teenage. The peak of the bell curve is maybe twenty five, but I've inc recently seen sixty and seventy year olds on reading. The way I describe it is whatever you're into or going through just in life, it's on Reddit somewhere.
It's just people, and so yeah, I think the platform is a little older.
Well, something that you've brought up a lot lately is the idea of when you're googling something, you actually find Reddit answers in Google. How big of a traffic driver.
Is that to you?
It's a big one, Like how big it's it's coming gone, it's coming gone. Over the years, but we've been seeing more traffic from Google because we made the website much faster, and Google like speed, so faster website rank higher. And then again, I think there's been this secular shift towards people want to hear from other real people, and that's what we provide. I think Google's pretty good just as a search engine of figuring out what are people actually looking for?
It happens to be Reddit right now.
What's it like to come back to the company, you know.
So it was nine years ago when I came back to Reddit. It was going through difficult time. But look, I love Reddit so much. I think Reddit is so important and the opportunity is so big that I mean, honestly, it's my dream job. I feel so thankful to have this job, and to really to have had it twice, you know, once the first time, and having come back.
It's sometimes I just kind of pinched myself. I feels so incredibly fortunate.
And being a publicly held company.
I mean, it's I think ipoing is it's a big milestone.
But I've likened it to getting married.
A lot of planning, a big special moment, you know. But we went out. We went out on a Thursday and on Monday, It's like, okay, work.
Where do you see yourself fitting in in this?
In the social media ecosystem?
Is it?
You have TikTok, you have meta platforms or Jones, Instagram, I mean, you have YouTube.
They just dominate. Where do you fit at?
We've been doing our own thing for such a long time.
If you were to look at our traffic, you would not see the rise or fall of any other social media platform. So we've we've kind of grown up in our own image.
We we like the way we do.
Things, and what we're seeing is that people increasingly just appreciate the Reddit way versus maybe what you find somewhere else.
The biggest challenge for your guys going forward, what do you see that as?
So I think similar to that last question, uh, staying true to our values from the way we do things. And so I as and remind the company we're here for our reason. We get to survive because we've done things to Reddit way, and it means sometimes we've maybe not grown as fast as we could have because we said, hey, that doesn't fit the.
Way we do things.
And so I think we have to take pressure to grow and pressure to do things this or that, Yeah, and just filter them through, well, how does it fit with Reddit?
And how do we make sure we stay true to ourselves.
Yeah, we should be tough as a publicly held company, as.
You know, it can be tough, but I think we're ready for it.
Listen, Steve, you are ending our show and our coverage here and just on a high point. So thank you so much and good luck with everything.
Thank you, thank you, you really appreciate it and Steve.
Helped me, the co founder of Course and CEO of Read It. That's a wrap, guys
A Bloomberg Business Week finishing up here at the Bloomberg Technology Summit