Reddit shifts toward logins as search traffic dries up in AI era
Reddit says it is becoming a primarily logged-in platform as search traffic dries up in the AI era, with login tests outside the U.S. this quarter.
Reddit is closing the front door, and the timing is spectacular. The company said Thursday it is becoming a primarily logged-in experience, one of the most significant shifts in its 21-year history, as AI changes how people find information and open-web traffic dries up.
Reddit plans to test requiring login for full access in select markets outside the U.S. this quarter. The announcement does not identify the markets. In a shareholder letter, the company acknowledged that search referral traffic was "down meaningfully".
Co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman said the goals are a better user experience, a stronger ads business and keeping bots from scraping Reddit's proprietary data. Logged-in users "spend more time on Reddit," he said, and known interests mean better ad targeting. He also played down the near-term risk: "the vast majority of engagement and over 80% of our monetization comes from our app and logged-in users."
Chief operating officer Jen Wong told Axios this is not a change in strategy, because Reddit has always built a direct destination. An open corpus brought a lot of search traffic over the last decade, she said, "so that became part of the equation."
My take: call it continuity if you like, but when the CEO talks about ads and scrapers in the same breath, that is a velvet rope going up. Reddit is betting its members will walk through it.
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Sources
Meanwhile at the anchor desk
The shareholder letter excerpt stops at "down meaningfully in Q", so we get an adjective where a quarter and a percentage should be. Meaningful is not a unit.
Login tests start outside the U.S. this quarter, in markets the announcement does not name. What a logged-out reader sees before the prompt is still unanswered, and that is the part I'd need to know.
