Reddit, Inc.

Good afternoon. My name is Julie Ann and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to Reddit's Q1 2024 earnings call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star one again. Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to Jesse Rose, Head of Investor Relations. You may now begin.

Great. Thanks, Julianne. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Reddit's first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. Joining me today to share our results are Steve Huffman, Reddit's co-founder and CEO, Jen Wong, Reddit COO, and Drew Valero, Reddit CFO. Their remarks will be followed by a Q&A session. We issued our first quarter letter to shareholders earlier today and have made it available on our investor relations website and our investor relations subreddit, RDDT. Before we get started, I'd like to remind you that our remarks today will include forward-looking statements, including those regarding our future plans, objectives, expected performance, and in particular, our guidance for the next quarter. Actual results may vary materially from today's statements. Information concerning risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause these results to differ is included in our SEC filings, including those stated in the risk factor section of our filings with the SEC. These forward-looking statements represent our outlook only as of the date of this call. We undertake no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements. Additionally, the matters we will discuss today will include both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliation of any non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures is set forth in our letter to shareholders. Non-GAAP financial measures should be considered in addition to, not as a substitute for, GAAP measures. Finally, today's conference call is being recorded and webcasted. Now, I'll turn the call over to Steve.

Thanks, Jesse. Hi, everyone. I'm Steve, Reddit's co-founder and CEO, and I'll be kicking things off for us today. Welcome to our first earnings call as a public company. I'd like to start off by saying thank you for spending a bit of your time with us today. We believe that great companies are built in the public markets, and we're proud to have made the transition this quarter. Our IPO is an important moment for the company, and I want to say thank you to our employees, our users, and investors who all made it possible. And I also want to say welcome to our new investors, particularly to our new user investors. For users to be able to own some of Reddit has long been a dream of mine. Starting today and going forward, we want to include the community in this process. Our current plan will be to answer a few of their questions on this call, and then we'll do a few more on the RDDT subreddit after this call. This process will likely evolve as we go forward. I also want to acknowledge the research analysts who have been with us on this journey, helping us to prepare by Not doing just one, but eight practice earnings calls over the last two years. Very much appreciated. Thank you. We're happy with our progress this quarter. More people are visiting Reddit than ever before. Users grew 37% year over year in the first quarter. We averaged over 80 million users daily and 300 million users weekly. And we grew across logged in, logged out, and within the US and abroad. The most reliable way for us to grow Reddit is to make Reddit better. As such, our primary focus this year is to continue to make Reddit faster, easier to use, and safer. Our new web platform, Shredit, is up to 100% of users, and it's more than twice as fast as the platform it replaces. Speed equals retention. Retention equals growth. We also recently updated our native apps with instant comment loading. Comments and conversation are the heart of Reddit, and we made it faster and easier for users to join in. Our investments in machine learning and AI will continue to improve relevance engagement, and moderation. We have and will continue to use machine learning to improve our ability to help users find communities they'll love, which in turn increases engagement across the platform. And for moderation, we've trained our own large language models that have dramatically reduced the time required for communities to enforce their own rules. We're in testing with this in a couple of communities right now, and we'll be rolling out more broadly soon. And to grow outside the US, we're using machine translation to unlock our mostly English corpus. We believe this will not only drive growth in the near term, but also over time will allow users from all over the world to connect regardless of the languages they speak. Now turning to some of our emerging areas as we think about the next generation of Reddit, a few of the initiatives we have here are the user economy, developer platform, and search. The user economy refers to a family of features that will allow users to spend and earn money on Reddit. Launching soon is a revamped version of user awards and Reddit Gold, which is our virtual currency that enables both of these things. And our developer platform, third party developers will be able to push the boundaries of what a subreddit can be. And we're excited with the early progress here. For example, Wall Street Bets has live stock tickers for trending stocks. And a number of sports subreddits have built live scoreboards to track gain. Historically, the value of Reddit to our users has been in conversation about recent topics. But with improvements to on-platform search, we can unlock the huge amount of latent value in all of our past content, including all of the answers, reviews, and advice that we have. And we're going to continue to invest here. It's an exciting time. The technology landscape is evolving, and Reddit is becoming more important and valuable. is one of the largest places for authentic connection and conversation online. And more and more people are discovering and appreciating this. We believe Reddit is more important now than ever before, not only as an alternative to traditional social media, but as we enter the AI era where the value of our corpus continues to grow. The paradox I see is that as more content on the internet is written by machines, there's an increasing premium on content that comes from real people. And we have nearly two decades of authentic conversation, unique perspectives, earnest advice, honest reviews, and answers to questions about every topic imaginable. There are multiple ways Reddit benefits from the evolving ecosystem, and we're still in the early stages of exploring use cases for Reddit's data. This includes both internally to improve the platform and experience for users and externally through partnerships. We remain committed to the open internet. but we need to be considered of where Reddit's data ends up and what it's used for. And we need to find the right balance between open and fair and respectful of our users. To wrap up, this was a strong start of the year for Reddit, and we're executing better than ever. We see so much opportunity and could not be more excited about our future. Thanks again for taking time with us today, and now I'll hand it over to Jen.