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“Generates thousands of pageviews”: Reddit comes into its own for publishers

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A new partnership between Reddit and NewsWhip allows publishers to predict which topics might be trending in the coming days or even weeks. The platform has also launched an embed feature that journalists can leverage.

Reddit offers a significant audience development opportunity for publishers, with over 430M monthly active users visiting more than 100,000 communities (subreddits). With 1.6Bn monthly visits, it’s big, and publishers are starting to pay attention.

The platform has also cleaned up its act, with Reddit’s management launching a huge clean-up effort a few years ago that is now reaping rewards – in 2021, it was estimated that Reddit amassed $439M U.S. dollars in revenues from its online advertising business. The growth came after Reddit abandoned programmatic advertising for native ads sold through its direct sales channels or on its Ads Platform.

Fast forward to 2023 and Reddit continues to combat bots, trolls, and fake accounts by filtering out content that violates its policies, while moderators are responsible for removing content that goes against community rules. Additionally, Reddit’s upvoting and downvoting system allows users to promote the most valuable content to the top of the feed, ensuring that the most relevant content rises to the top.

Reddit embeds & NewsWhip partnership

To make it easier for publishers to integrate Reddit posts into stories, the platform recently launched a new content embed feature that allows publishers to seamlessly integrate Reddit comments into stories. Speaking to media monitoring platform, NewsWhip, Gabriel Sands, Reddit’s News and Sports Partnerships Lead says, “Embeds are definitely the preferred and, frankly, legally compliant way to cite Reddit content off of our platform.”

The power of (Reddit) quotes can’t be overstated. Whether it’s a chemical taste in a popular rotisserie chicken in the Costco subreddit or gaining a real-time glimpse of employee attitudes about a policy change at Target, the embed feature adds a new dynamic and depth to stories that a reporter could ever hope to source working the phones or on-location.

Mark Brown, NewsWhip

NewsWhip and Reddit also recently formed a content partnership where publishers and journalists can detect trends before they reach wider public consciousness. It works by NewsWhip leveraging a real-time API feed from Reddit to analyze data and predict upcoming trending topics, enabling reporters to receive notifications about relevant issues related to their beat or vertical.

Sands explains that the partnership is crucial for facilitating content discovery on a larger scale than previously possible on reddit.com alone. He believes that the NewsWhip integration can serve as a “silver bullet” for content discovery.

The Reddit function is incredibly useful for finding stories because you can find stuff on there that hasn’t been written about yet.

Yara Silva, Group Head of Social Media for Reach

Treading respectfully and carefully

Speaking to Mapping Journalism, Ashley Dye, Audience Director, The Marshall Project, says that Reddit is one of his first ports of call, “When we publish a story, I try to sit back and think: What is this story answering? And are people asking that question in some subreddits? And I move from there to find the right subreddits to go into.”

“I try to be very mindful of how people have built communities around their subreddits. I read their rules to see how they feel about self-promotion before I share a link.”

You should think of a community on Reddit as going into a community center where you have never stepped foot and going, “all right, listen to me.” I think it’s incredibly arrogant to assume that everyone wants to hear from you, so I try not to do that.

Ashley Dye, Audience Director, The Marshall Project

“Overall, it’s a tiny percentage (of referrals) compared to search or other social platforms, but still about No. 8 or 9 for our annual referrers. But sometimes, when something hits the right subreddit, it can send thousands and thousands of pageviews.”