Is Reddit the Next Facebook? Inside the “Front Page’s” Explosive 2025 Growth Strategy

Explosive 2025 Growth Strategy

For nearly two decades, Reddit has been the internet’s sprawling, chaotic, and brilliant “front page.” It’s where trends are born, where niche hobbies find a global audience, and where you can find a more helpful answer to a complex problem than anywhere else on the web. Yet, for most of that time, it was viewed more as a quirky cultural institution than a serious business.

That narrative is officially dead.

In the wake of its recent IPO, Reddit is not just growing; it’s exploding. A look at its third-quarter 2025 earnings call reveals a company that has finally cracked the code, pairing its massive, deeply-engaged audience with a powerful and rapidly scaling monetization engine.

The numbers are staggering. Revenue soared to $585 million, a 68% jump year-over-year. Its advertising business, the core of its revenue, grew an astonishing 74%. And this isn’t just “growth at all costs.” Reddit is a GAAP-profitable company, posting $163 million in net income and hitting a 40% adjusted EBITDA margin—a profitability goal it set for itself at its IPO and achieved in short order.

With 116 million daily active unique users (DAUq) and 444 million weekly active unique users (WAUq), both growing around 20%, the question is no longer if Reddit can be a top-tier social media company, but rather what its ceiling is.

But is it the next Facebook? The comparison is tempting, but it misses the point. Facebook built its empire on the social graph—connecting you to people you know. Reddit built its platform on the interest graph, connecting you to ideas and communities you care about.

And based on its latest strategy, that model is proving to be its greatest strength.

The “Why Now?” – Reddit’s Differentiated Path

For years, the best way to find a real, human answer to a niche question was to add “reddit” to your Google search. The company knows this. CEO Steve Huffman describes Reddit conversations as “uniquely authentic, contextual, and helpful”.

Unlike the polished, performative gloss of Instagram or the professional posturing of LinkedIn, Reddit is built on trusted, community-vetted perspectives. This has quietly turned it into the #3 most-visited site in the United States, according to Semrush data from October 2025. As Huffman noted, “That puts us in rare company. YouTube is #2 and Amazon is #4”.

This is Reddit’s moat. In an internet overflowing with AI-generated content and misinformation, Reddit is the place people to go to find genuinely useful information.

The company’s new strategy is built on three pillars: making the platform easier to use, turning it into a search destination, and aggressive international growth. And as the Q3 2025 question-and-answer session with analysts revealed, the company is executing this playbook with a newfound, relentless focus.

What’s Next? Reddit’s Playbook Revealed in the Q&A

Beyond the headline numbers, the Q&A session from the earnings call provided a clear roadmap for Reddit’s future. The executives were peppered with questions about user growth, product, and monetization, and their answers paint a picture of a company that knows exactly what it needs to do next.

Priority #1: Fixing the “Front Door”

For all its success, Reddit’s biggest hurdle has always been its notorious learning curve. New users are often confused by subreddit rules, clunky interfaces, and a “too many steps” onboarding process. Often you need a certain amount of Karma or need to be a user for a certain amount of days to post in most subreddits and that can turn away a lot of potential long term users. 

This is Reddit’s single biggest focus.

When asked about improving the user experience, Steve Huffman was blunt. The goal is to make Reddit “easier to use and more rewarding from day 1”. In the Q&A, he elaborated, stating they are working on streamlining onboarding and getting users to amazing content in their very first session.

“We want to get rid of those steps,” Huffman said. Instead of interrogating new users with screens of topic selectors , the new plan is to drop them right into a personalized home feed and let the platform’s much more capable machine-learning do the work of finding relevant communities.

The entire strategy boils down to one word: retention. By improving that first session user experience, Reddit believes it can dramatically increase the frequency of visits , which compounds into growth.

Priority #2: All-In on the App

While much of Reddit’s traffic comes from the web (including external search), the company’s future is in your pocket.

COO Jen Wong was unequivocal: “our consumer product road map is focusing more intently on the Reddit app”.

Why the laser focus? The app is where Reddit can build “direct, high-engagement relationships”. These logged in app users are the most valuable to the business. The app allows for a more personalized, intuitive experience with better onboarding and search integration.

This is a classic high-growth tech play: convert casual web visitors into loyal, logged-in app users, which drives up engagement, improves retention, and creates a more valuable audience for advertisers.

Priority #3: Becoming the Answer Engine

Reddit is done being Google’s best source of information. It’s building its own search destination.

The key to this is a product called “Reddit Answers,” a feature that provides curated, community-powered insights. In Q3, over 75 million people searched directly on Reddit every week. The company is now integrating Reddit Answers directly into its core search experience.

This isn’t just an English-language play. Huffman revealed in the Q&A that Reddit Answers was just rolled out to non-English languages, including Spanish, German, French, Italian, and Portuguese.

Huffman called search “one of our biggest opportunities” and a key part of the new user strategy. When a new user’s first search on Reddit is great results and it’s differentiated, that should turn into improved retention.

Priority #4: Scaling the Ad Engine (and Making it Easy)

A 74% growth in ad revenue doesn’t happen by accident. It also doesn’t happen just by having more users. Reddit’s ad platform is getting smarter, and fast.

When asked what she was most excited about for 2026, Jen Wong pointed to three key areas in the lower-funnel (ads designed to get a user to make a purchase or install an app):

1. Automation: Reddit is testing an “end-to-end automated campaign platform”. This is a game-changer. It makes the platform “easier, more accessible” for the thousands of small and mid-sized businesses that don’t have a massive ad team.
2. Shopping: The company is leaning into Dynamic Product Ads (DPA), which lets advertisers showcase their products directly on the platform.
3. App Installs: They are heavily investing in better measurement and optimization for app install ads, a massive mobile advertising market.

They are also rolling out uniquely Reddit ad formats, like conversation summary add-ons that let a brand (like video game publisher Bethesda) integrate positive Reddit conversations directly into their ads.

This is how Reddit is attracting new advertisers at a breakneck pace, with its total active advertiser count expanding by over 75% year-over-year.

The Human Element in an AI World

In an era defined by Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative AI, one analyst asked how Reddit plans to compete, especially as video becomes more dominant.

Huffman’s answer was a clear positioning for the company’s future: “Reddit is for humans by humans”.

While AI content populates the web, Reddit remains the home for authentic human conversation. And while video is Reddit’s fastest-growing content type , they are doing it in a uniquely Reddit way. He pointed to a recent video Ask Me Anything (AMA) hosted by NASA, where astronauts answered questions from the community using video replies directly in the comments .

It’s not about replacing text, which Huffman says isn’t going anywhere. It’s about using every content type—text, image, and video—as a prompt for conversation.

I do think video is a big opportunity for Reddit to grow its userbase and its advertising scale. Reddit Answers isn’t the last new product they’ll launch and I could easily see a video button on the bottom of the reddit app that allows users to scroll video content that they’re interested in relatively soon.

So… Is It the Next Facebook?

No. It’s the first Reddit, and it’s finally acting like the tech giant it has always had the potential to be.

Facebook built the social graph. Reddit is monetizing the interest graph. That’s a good place to be and there’s plenty of runway for growth in that area. I’m definitely not the only one that adds reddit to google searches and if they can get people doing that automatically within the app, that’d be a big win for them.

The Reddit of 2025 is not the clunky, insider-heavy platform of 2015. The Q3 earnings call depicts a company with a clear-eyed, aggressive vision. It is relentlessly focused on its app , obsessed with fixing its front door to retain new users , and building a search engine to rival the best.

It’s doing all this while scaling its ad business at a jaw-dropping rate and delivering serious profitability. In fact, it’s already looking past its 40% margin goal to a new “North Star” of 50%.

That’s not to say Reddit has no issues. They do have certain topic subreddits that are one-sided in discussion and overly moderated by an all volunteer and sometimes power hungry moderator team and a tendency to lead to hive-minded discussions, add to toxicity and lead to a fragmented community. That’s not an easy problem to fix and exists on other social medica platforms but it’s certainly something that Reddit should be working on fixing.

On top of that, not everyone loves text so I do think video is the next step forward for them in a way that keeps it separate from text but adds as an additive item to the service.

As an investment, Reddit is certainly showing potential. It looks expensive on paper but there’s plenty of growth ahead and Reddit is still just a $39B market cap company which pales in comparison to META’s $1.6T. They are naturally quite a ways apart in terms of revenue and income but Reddit is on a growth trajectory that should send them into the $100B+ range sometime in the near future.

Reddit isn’t trying to be “the next anything”. As Steve Huffman concluded, “We’re focused on being the best version of ourselves”.

And as of 2025, that version looks bigger, faster, and more profitable than ever before.

Disclosure : I am long RDDT, META and may be long other stocks discussed in this article. This is not investment advice. Please talk to a qualified financial professional before making any investment decisions.