10/29/2026

speaker
Jonathan
Conference Operator

Good afternoon. My name is Jonathan, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to Reddit's Q3 2026 earnings call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remark, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during that 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 begin your conference.

speaker
Jesse Rose
Head of Investor Relations

Thanks, Jonathan. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Reddit's third quarter 2026 earnings call. Joining me are Steve Huffman, Reddit's co-founder and CEO, Jen Wong, Reddit COO, and Drew Vollero, Reddit CFO. I'd like to remind you that our remarks today will include forward-looking statements. Actual results may vary. Information concerning risks and other factors that could cause these results to vary is included in our SEC filings. These forward-looking statements represent our outlook only as of the date of this call, and we undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. During this call, we will discuss both GAAP and non-GAAP financials. Reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financials can be found in our letter to shareholders. Our third quarter letter to shareholders and earnings press release are available on our investor relations website and investor relations subreddit. And now I'll turn the call over to Steve.

speaker
Steve Huffman
Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Thanks, Jesse. Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining us, and welcome to our quarterly earnings call. In Reddit's 21 years, the Internet has changed in ways that would have been impossible to predict. We've gone from flip phones to smartphones to personal AI agents. And through it all, Reddit has always owned our own corner of the Internet, offering people something that no one else does. Social media has evolved from friends and families to followers and famous people, and from status updates to the mindless scroll. Web search is evolving from a gateway to the web to becoming an AI-powered destination itself. While extraordinarily useful and powerful, AI search solves a different problem than Reddit. AI does not fulfill people's fundamental need for community, connection, and belonging with other people, and it lacks context and nuance. The Reddit experience captures the human experience in a way that no other platform can replicate. Only Reddit can help people navigate life's journey through the lens of other people's lived experiences. Only Reddit can help you feel both like a multifaceted, unique individual and a part of a greater whole, and do so without needing to reveal your real world identity. That's why Reddit is, and always has been, a distinct and direct destination. People seek out Reddit because we meet a universal need they simply can't get anywhere else online. Our work now is about doubling down on what makes Reddit Reddit and making Reddit more of a daily habit. We come into that work with clear advantages and revenue momentum in the business. And you can see that in the exceptional commercial results we delivered in the third quarter. We generated 53% revenue growth, something few companies are doing, and it's even more significant when you consider that's on top of nearly 70% revenue growth last year. Those results in Q3 helped us cross $3 billion in revenue over the last 12 months. Our margins, which are already industry-leading, expanded across the board. Reddit's continued growth at scale is proof of the strength of our business, the demand for our platform, and the value we provide advertisers. And it's that consistent delivery of growth and profitability that earned us a place in the S&P 500 index earlier this year. Earlier this quarter, excuse me. Yet while our business continues to grow significantly, internet search and how people discover things online continues to change rapidly and significantly. Our search referral traffic was down meaningfully in Q3, with the decline accelerating later in the quarter. The biggest impact was on logged out and web traffic, but some of the impact flows through to logged in and app traffic, since search referral is a common source of re-engagement for users. The company helped to offset the declines by both driving reach primarily through user marketing and also by continuing to improve the product. These declines have continued into the early part of Q4. During October, we have seen that search traffic has dropped by more than 1 million referrals on average per week. If this rate of decline continues, current trends would suggest that total DAUQs could fall in Q4 by a low double-digit percentage from our current base of 130 million DAUQs. However, search referral trends do not determine our relevancy, and they do not define our future. LoggedIn and AppDial are our most valuable users, and they are our primary focus. And we grew LoggedIn and AppDial sequentially. Together, these make up the vast majority of engagement and over 80% of the monetization on Reddit. Growing this high-value audience speaks to the strength of Reddit as a destination. And this is what matters for the long-term health of our platform and our business. So, as we look ahead, our strategy to make Reddit a direct daily habit for more people is simple. Make Reddit awesome, grow community and belonging, and bring in new audiences. Making Reddit awesome means making it more relevant and easier to navigate. getting to personalization faster and creating fun new experiences on Reddit. This will both improve retention of new users and deepen engagement of our core users. Our work in ML feeds and app performance is delivering results. The percentage of new users who return the first week after installing the Reddit app is up double digits quarter over quarter and over 50% year over year. Video creation and consumption are both up as are chained video views. will continue our work in these areas in the coming quarters, and I'm particularly excited about some of the areas we'll be testing to make the core feed experience more consistent and predictable, and to grow some of our new experiences like games and visual podcasts. To grow community and belonging, we've been making it easier to create, grow, and contribute to communities on Reddit. This quarter, we've continued to grow the number of communities on Reddit and increase the contribution from our users. We added another billion posts and comments to our corpus. Looking forward, our work will be to make subreddits more distinct, to deepen the sense of belonging by making joining subreddits more intentional and significant, and to make moderation much easier and more consistent by giving moderators AI-powered tools. This approach has helped our own enforcement team reduce the median time to action on violating content from 58 hours to five seconds this year. Our current opportunity is to better retain the large cohort of users who try Reddit for the first time every day by executing on the above. We see a large number of unattributed, aka word of mouth, installs every day. We also have a large number of reinstalls, which we can mitigate through things like an improved incognito mode in the app. And of course, we will continue to convert our still significant number of search-referred users from mobile web to app. Currently, only about 13% of eligible mobile web users are seeing the app conversion prompt, so this has room to scale. While early, so far we have seen that app users that come to Reddit through marketing retain at rates similar to app users that come organically, so we will continue to invest here. Together, these efforts will help us reach more people and convert more first-time users into regular Reddit users. and a key piece of work to retain new audiences is shifting Reddit to a logged in only experience. It's a big one for us and it's a big one for me. I want to take a minute to outline why we're making this change. Moving to primarily logged in will ensure our users have the best Reddit experience possible and can find the content and communities most relevant to them. It's better for our business because we have more signals for ads targeting and being logged in leads to higher engagement generally. It also allows us to protect access to Reddit's extremely valuable corpus of data and helps us better adapt to emerging regulations around the world. In Q4, we'll begin fully testing this in select markets outside the US. The results of those tests will inform an optimized version of logged in only Reddit globally. Pretty much all the major ad platforms have gone through this transition, so we are excited and are moving quickly. With the above work, We will make Reddit a fun, fulfilling, direct daily habit for every internet user. Thank you, and now over to Jen.

Disclaimer

This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.

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