Reddit CEO Intends To Show More Reviews And Recommendations

Reddit’s Q2 earnings call revealed that Reddit intends to surface more evergreen content to users. The company also explained that it intends to make its search bar more visually engaging by integrating advertising modules. It’s clear that Reddit aspires to compete with online content publishers and become a stronger competitor to social networks.

Reddit Targeting Recommendations And Reviews

The question was whether Huffman could visualize the Reddit feed integrating video and machine learning in the way other social platforms do, what the engagement trends were within Reddit’s app search, and where Reddit stood on launching advertising within the app search results.

Huffman responded that, with the search bar fully integrated within its app, Reddit is now seeing growth in the number of people who search and in the number of searches. He characterized its progress as “chipping away” at it.

He then pivoted to sharing his opinion that Reddit is the best place to surface recommendations and reviews.

Huffman explained his point:

“And I think for many queries – for many queries that I run at least – Reddit is now the best platform for searching Reddit. That hasn’t always been the case.

…But I think any query where you want to know something or want to see multiple perspectives, like what should I watch? What do people think about this? What should I buy? Reddit … provides the best answers on the internet. So I’m really encouraged with the progress there, and we’re starting to look towards ads on that surface which I’ll turn it over to Jen to address.”

Monetizing Reddit Search With Ads

Reddit’s advertising aspirations are dependent on getting the search part right. And part of getting that search part right is being able to surface recommendations and reviews.

Chief Operating Officer Jen Wong expressly tied search to the consumer’s shopping experience, explaining that there are two angles to it. The first angle was adding product images and rich media modules to search. The second part was adding advertising modules with multiple retailers and products.

Wong explained:

“So search is in a space where it’s very married to like a shopping experience. And so we — there’s a couple of different angles to this.

One is that we think that the search page can be enriched with more like rich media modules. So it can have product visuals from the catalogs that we have when people are searching or discussing or a specific product.

And we’ve started to do that. We had done a test earlier on electronics and consumer electronics and now we’ve expanded those categories. And so that enriches the core search experience and hopefully increases engagement so people get more out of that experience.

And I do agree with Steve, that I think especially the agentic ask function on Reddit search, I think, is now the best way to search Reddit.

The second is, what goes along with that engagement at the product level when you have a match is ads, right? So I talked about our Shopping Listing Ads where you can have a module that has multiple different retailers and product types and brands in one module. That’s a great sort for a search page.

And that’s ultimately how I think ads would be well represented on search. So that’s a space that we’re eyeing. We clearly have the capability to do it. We keep tracking as the page settles and as users adopt that, …we do see an advertising opportunity there. And the good news is we have the infrastructure, and I think a lot of that capability, already queued up.”

Reddit Wants To Surface Evergreen Content

Huffman expressed that they have a massive amount of evergreen content about parenting and reviews that they want to show within their feeds.

User feeds are recommendation engines. Google Discover and YouTube are examples of recommendation engines that show the latest articles and videos that users are likely to engage with.

Google Discover and YouTube prioritize fresh content; evergreen content is not a priority for Google. But it is a priority for Reddit because they have a massive amount of evergreen content that users can engage with.

Unfortunately for Reddit, their feed is bottlenecked because of “small models” that hinder Reddit from showing evergreen topics. This is a serious problem for Reddit because their technology constrains them to show only a week’s worth of content.

That’s good news for publishers that rely on evergreen content. However, once Reddit solves this problem, they will be on a path that leads toward keeping users on Reddit for longer periods, engaging with evergreen topics, including product reviews.

This is the question that was asked:

“And then on the feed models, I don’t know if you can maybe give us some type of purview into the drivers. Obviously, there’s a lot that goes into building these models between retrieval and ranking and serving and refresh and there’s million different parameters, and I probably don’t want to get too much detail, but just kind of any sense can you give us on maybe what are some of the specific areas you’re focusing within the feed improvement?”

Huffman replied:

“So …posts that are eligible for recommendation, Reddit right now is limited to a week. So Reddit is basically… our feed is almost like a real-time feed where we have this actual mass of corpus. Much of that content is timeless.

So think about things like parenting advice or book or movie reviews, things like that are relevant for a very long time. We don’t show this on the feed at all.

So we can dramatically improve candidate selection, model size, model speed, the signals that go in from users, pretty much every dimension. We have, sometimes order of magnitude improvement opportunity. So we’ll be doing that work over the next year, and I expect every improvement we make to work because we’re just starting from such a low base.”

Reddit Intends To Surface More Reviews And Evergreen Content

This is a compelling sign that Reddit intends to surface its vast amount of reviews, advice, and recommendations through its feed, as well as more aggressively monetize product searches with advertising. This may not be good news to publishers of evergreen content, like recipes and reviews, but there is still at least a year.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Diego Thomazini