Reddit Steps into AI-Powered Commerce

0:00Reddit is taking a huge step into AI powered commerce. Now, this is an interesting story. Reddit feels like one of those companies that, of course, is a legendary online company, but has definitely had to make some adjustments and shift due to AI. We had just last year, their CEO came out and said that AI bots were not a net driver of any sort of traffic to Reddit. And then we have, of course, a lot of these pivots and moves where they're selling their training data to companies like Google and OpenAI for, you know, multi hundred million dollar deals for training data. So it seems like Reddit, you know, a company that has went public is really trying to capitalize on AI, but they're trying to thread the line of not, you know, doing dead Internet theory and making everything on the Internet just AI, right?

0:43Because they have a social media platform that really relies on real humans sharing real experiences. So there's an interesting balancing act. It feels like Reddit has to play, but that doesn't stop them from rolling out new products. They have a brand new step into AI powered commerce that I think is fascinating. and they've just shared a bunch of the numbers which are honestly absolutely mind-blowing. So I want to get into all of that today on the podcast but before we do if you want to try any of the AI models I talk about on the show I'd love for you to go check out AIbox.ai. I'm super stoked I just did an entire redesign of the whole platform from the ground up.

1:16If you've tried it or seen it in the past I would love for you to go check it out today as the whole platform has been overhauled and I hope this makes it simpler, faster, easier. And we just launched an$8.99 pricing to make it even cheaper to get access to over 40 of the top AI models. We also have annual pricing where you can save 20%, but we've been super excited. The platform's growing a lot. We're adding new features. Let me know if you ever have any features that you want to see in the platform. That's why I make this podcast is to help grow this platform. So I'd love for you to go check it out, AIbox.ai.

1:48It's linked in the description. Okay, so just on Thursday, Reddit said that they were testing a new AI-driven search experience. This is going to kind of mix some community recommendations with products from their shopping and advertising partners. And there is a small group of US users right now that are going to be seeing some of these interactive product carousels inside of search results. So there's going to be pricing, there's going to be images, and a direct link to buy. So it's kind of like ads built into their AI search experience that they have kind of been talking about and rolling out.

2:21I think all of this really is trying to build on top of their, they have a huge strategy where they're trying to turn their community conversations, which is what Reddit's known for, right? Everyone asks a question and people respond. And so these community conversations, they're trying to turn them into actionable commerce, right? actually being able to put ads in. Reddit has been notorious and famous for being basically this platform that is really skeptical of ads. They're very suspicious. They don't like clicking on them or buying things from ads. This is kind of what Reddit is known for. And Reddit, obviously, that's like a flavor and a community that has got a lot of users.

2:54But at the same time, Reddit needs to make money. So last year, Reddit said that they're going to introduce their first shoppable ad formats. They're going to have dynamic product ads, which basically are going going to show you personalized product recommendations, which are based on your user interests. Now they have a whole new search experience push that they're doing right now. And I think that whole concept is going to try to, you know, further this by basically putting these purchasable products directly into organic search queries. And I think it's interesting because Reddit has so much data on their users, what subreddits they're in, what types of things they're interested in, monetizing that and helping, helping their users to see things that they might be interested in is a no-brainer.

3:35So I think an example of what this might look like if a user is searching for something like, you know, best noise canceling headphones, right? Or maybe like an electronic gift idea for like a college student. If you're searching for those, you might now see a product carousel at the bottom of the results page and the featured items are going to be pulled from the product. So there's going to be things that are specifically mentioned in related posts and comments, which is interesting, right? So it's like on Amazon, when you search for products and you see them, you can obviously go see reviews below the products.

4:05And so Reddit is trying to make it so that when you see these kinds of product ads, you can see conversations that are and comments and posts that are happening around those products, right? The new Bose headphones, are they like any good? And then you see like people actually talking about them. Now I'm actually going to go ahead and say, I think this is awesome. Basically anyone that has ever purchased, you know, not anyone, a lot of times when people are purchasing electronics on Amazon, you go straight to Reddit to get the reviews to hear what people actually think about it. It feels like the Amazon comments and reviews sometimes are honest, sometimes you could you feel like they're purchased or they're bought it or like they're just some suspicious stuff going on some fake stuff going on with Amazon.

4:43I know they try to fight that. But nevertheless, because it's a commerce platform, you see that a lot. Reddit, on the other hand, just feels like you're getting people's real raw authentic, you know, answers. Now, maybe by embedding this kind of commerce straight into Reddit, it's going to become a bigger problem. Although I'm sure, you know, retailers and other people are trying to have been trying to game Reddit forever. So I don't really think that that's necessarily going to be a thing. But overall, I think this is I think this is phenomenal. You're gonna get way better insights into the products you want to buy by reading someone's experience or their comments on it and their reviews.

5:15And that's generally very trusted. Reddit's kind of the source where people go. So I think this is the place where people already go for the research. Just put the product there so people can buy it directly. And Reddit gets more of the value than having to, you know, give them all the data and then they go over Amazon and make the purchase. So I think by tapping into that before the user is going over to the retailer site to go and actually purchase the thing is kind of genius. So they had a whole blog post about this. Reddit said that the future is designed to surface, quote, top recommended products directly from discussions.

5:45They said like their goal really is to make everything still seem very authentic and very community driven. They put a really big emphasis on continuing to kind of refine this experience based on how everyone's using it. Like they're like, hey guys, like this is a test. If you, if you hate it, we're going to try to like tweak it and fix it. But I think basically this is putting Reddit right in line with what like TikTok and Instagram are doing. Both of those companies have spent years integrating shopping into social experiences, right? Because influencers were talking about products and then, you know, we have TikTok shop where you can just buy directly on TikTok.

6:17I think it is also coming at a time where there's kind of this bigger industry shift towards AI powered commerce. Last September, OpenAI and ChatGPT, they introduced like an instant checkout feature that would let you go and buy things from Etsy or Shopify. And you can make these purchases like inside of your ChatGPT conversation. So I think for Reddit, there's obviously a huge opportunity, but I think it goes a lot further than just shopping features alone. They had a whole earnings call and their CEO, who's Steve Huffman, he was kind of pointing to this AI search as, you know, potentially a huge product and revenue driver for them.

6:50Search usage is already growing a lot on their platform. Weekly active users of Reddit grew 30 % year over year. It went from 60 million to 80 million. And I think at the same time, the weekly active users of AI powered Reddit answers features were up from a million in the first quarter of 2025 to 15 million by the fourth quarter. So, you know, they went from 1 million to 15 million. They're seeing massive growth in just that AI powered product. A lot of executives over at Reddit right now, they're talking about how they're going to do a lot of M &A, some mergers and acquisitions, and how that's going to play a big role in expanding some of their AI capabilities.

7:27So I'm excited to see who they acquire and who they pull in to help with that. On their fourth quarter earnings call, they have their CFO, who's Andrew Valero. And he said that right now Reddit is actively looking to acquire technologies, capabilities and companies that either scale effectively across Reddit's user base, or they help to grow their audience. So they're like, look, either we take your company, we plug it into Reddit's user base, and we grow you there, or you're literally just going to grow Reddit altogether. So he suggested that investors, you know, he's talking to all of their investors as a publicly traded company now.

8:01But he's saying, look, you don't need to overthink what, you know, know, scaled quote unquote, scaled opportunities might mean. He said this is kind of a spectrum of potential deals. Historically, I think Reddit's ad tech team has benefited from acquiring and kind of integrating a bunch of other tech rather than building them internally. That's just how Reddit has done it. He said that that has helped them move and get to market faster. It's improved their monetization a lot. And I think a lot of those efforts are paying off. Reddit actually said that they had$725 million in quarterly revenue.

8:32They have$690 million of that coming from advertising. And so I think the global daily active users is up, you know, 19 % year over year. It's at 121 million. And the earnings per share is$1.24. That beat expectations. This is really important for a company that, you know, it didn't go public that long ago. They want to show that they're still in a strong position. A lot of people said, AI is going to kill Reddit because people aren't going to go to Reddit for answers. They're going to just ask ChatGPT. And I think they've really proven that they are still a solid source. They're a good place where people can go and it's very credible and get unbiased answers.

9:08Or, I mean, I'm sure there's all sorts of biases embedded, but it's kind of the feeling of the community. So I think right now Reddit is putting a lot of investment into AI, particularly in search and advertising. But they're also continuing to make a lot of specific acquisitions. So in the last couple of years, they purchased AI and ad tech startups. They purchased Memorable AI in 2024. They also had an acquisition for Spell, Spike Trap, Otterloo, Meaning Cloud. All of those are basically trying to strengthen their machine learning and ad optimization capabilities. And I think with AI usage obviously exploding, I mean, we all use it more today than we ever have.

9:44And I think that this commerce integration that they're trying to expand right now is really in a perfect position to help their users discover more things, obviously. but also it's going to become a really sophisticated revenue machine for a Reddit, which I think is what they're really focused on right now. Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, this breakdown of what's going on at Reddit, I would really appreciate a rating and review on the show would help out a ton. If you haven't left a review already over on Spotify or on Apple podcast, it would help out an immense amount.

10:17And so, yeah, if you could leave a review, I'd appreciate it. Thanks so much, guys. Hope you have a fantastic rest of your week.