Reddit’s UK Year in Review – why UK advertisers are starting to move to the ‘front page of the internet’

This week, Reddit staff posted their first ever Year in Review specifically for UK subreddits. This comes hand in hand with Reddit’s announcement earlier this year to launch a London operation with the mission to grow the UK Reddit community and advertising business.

The year in review is littered with interesting factoids about how UK users are spending their time, from ice cream being discussed more than cups of tea or sausage rolls in R/CasualUK, to Revolution beating Mac and Nyx as the most discussed beauty brands in R/MakeupAddictionUK.

The key takeaway for advertisers, however, should be the fact that the UK is Reddit’s second largest user base (after the US) and is growing 48% year over year.

It was only at the start of December that Reddit revealed its daily active users for the first time, to better align with the other social platforms. Whilst 52 million daily users might not compare to the likes of Facebook (1.82B) or Twitter (187M), Reddit as a whole is growing at a far greater rate, up 44% year over year compared to 29% for Twitter and 12% for Facebook. The data available suggests that the UK audience is growing slightly ahead of that 44%, which is why Reddit is making this big push to get UK advertisers on board.

As Reddit launched its push into the UK market, it teamed up with GlobalWebIndex to highlight to advertisers the USPs of advertising on Reddit:

• 75% of UK site users say that they are receptive towards brand participation within their online communities
• 61% of Reddit users are more likely to trust a brand that participates on Reddit
• UK users spend on average 33 minutes a day on the platform
• 68% of users are aged between 18 – 24
• 40% of the user base in the UK are female
• The UK user base has a higher household income than the UK national average

A quick look at SimilarWeb shows that only 38% of UK Reddit users also recently visited Facebook and only 22% visited Instagram (not including app data). This aligns with the idea that Reddit users often shun the mainstream social channels; tired of seeing what old school friends had for lunch they find solace in the self-built communities of Reddit like R/RateMyPlate.

Reddit VP of Advertising, Harold Klaje, also agreed with users on what differentiates Reddit from its competitors: “its informed and passionate communities – these are social media users who are actively seeking rather than aimlessly scrolling and this creates an extremely valuable environment for brands to connect and engage where interest is already baked in.” Advertisers can tap into these communities with relative ease, from large audiences such as R/UKPersonalFinance (184k members) to smaller niche audiences like R/BitcoinUK (11.2k members), there is a community for pretty much anyone.

Fears of extremism and trolls may well have dampened previous attempts by Reddit to forge itself as a serious advertising platform. This forced Reddit to try to clean up their image earlier this year by culling hundreds of subreddits that do not meet their community guidelines. There are still communities that brands would not want to be associated with, but best practice to deal with these issues is to keep an up to date exclusion list and remove commenting from any ads that are not AMAs (Ask Me Anything).

As an advertiser, you can run paid campaigns targeting specific subreddits or more general interests such as PC Games or Cooking as well as using a pixel to retarget existing site users. Whilst the Reddit advertising platform doesn’t come with the same bells and whistles of Facebook, it still has the ability to optimise based on particular objectives (e.g. traffic, conversions, video views or app installs) and the simple and transparent approach avoids dissuading novice advertisers.  

There is also a lot of organic opportunity for advertisers on Reddit, from indie film makers offering AMAs to promote their new film to Gaming brands posting giveaways and competitions. Reddit is referred to as the front page of the internet for a reason; users often view Reddit as a source for news and inspiration so tapping into the Reddit zeitgeist with creative content can make users feel a personal connection with a brand or product.

The UK audiences on Reddit are ripe for picking from advertisers looking to expand beyond their existing social channels. Larger brands such as Samsung and Lenovo have already jumped aboard the Reddit train. As the platform continues its big push into the UK over 2021, Social Managers up and down the country should be asking: is Reddit right for us?

If you’d like more advice on social media marketing, get in touch with us today at info@summitmedia.com.