Why it matters:
- Reddit has more than 110 million daily active users and more than 100,00 active communities.
- The discussion platform’s ad revenues are projected to grow 30.9% in 2025, faster than any other major social media platform, according to eMarketer. And Reddit content is increasingly showing up in Google searches and AI searches and is being used to train artificial intelligence (AI) content.
- As a result, companies large and small ranging from Jack Daniel’s to tree care service Tree Amigos are increasingly driving business on Reddit by leveraging influencers, providing useful information, and placing targeted advertising.
Reddit offers an economical, highly targeted platform for brands seeking to reach potential customers, according to companies including Jack Daniel’s, Tree Amigos, and Alchemy Streaming.
These companies and others are driving business on Reddit by leveraging influencers, providing useful information, and placing targeted advertising.
“Reddit has become a critical piece of the search marketing puzzle,” said Hailey Friedman, Co-Founder of Growth Marketing Pro, which offers digital marketing services to brands across multiple digital platforms, including Reddit.
Reddit has always been a closely monitored discussion platform that offers users the opportunity to exchange information and engage in conversation around specific topics. As it has gained more widespread recognition over the years, the site has increasingly been viewed as a credible source for content.
In fact, last August Google began to surface Reddit more prominently in response to searches for certain topics, which has helped drive more online users to the platform. At the same time, artificial intelligence platforms are also tapping Reddit as a source for credible information, said Friedman.
“Having your brand name mentioned in Reddit is becoming really important for search,” she said. “Reddit is showing up for almost every search query in Google.”
The challenge brands face, Friedman said, is that Reddit shuns content that is self-promotional, which leads some brands to rely strictly on paid advertising to reach users on the platform. Others tap into influencers to mention their brand, and some have found success by posting content on Reddit that is informative and avoids the wrath of the Reddit moderators.
A vehicle for advertisers: ‘Brands are figuring out how to reach Reddit’s audience and niche communities in ways that resonate.’
With more than 110 million daily active users and more than 100,000 active communities, Reddit has also become an increasingly relevant platform for advertisers. It has attracted brands both big and small, including such widely known marketers as Jack Daniel’s, Sharpie, Axe, Sega, Sephora, and Carl’s Jr.
Reddit is on marketers’ radar thanks to its rising prominence in search, growing user base, and new ad formats. And brands are figuring out how to reach the platform’s audience and niche communities in ways that resonate.eMarketer Reddit Marketing 2025 report
Jack Daniel’s, for example, drove incremental sales of $5 million using targeted Reddit ads during the holiday season, according to a Reddit case study. The campaign targeted Reddit communities such as r/cocktails and r/country. (The “r/” indicates a subreddit based on that specific topic.)
In fact, Reddit’s ad revenues are projected to grow 30.9% in 2025, outpacing growth at all other social media platforms, according to a recent eMarketer report.
“Reddit is on marketers’ radar thanks to its rising prominence in search, growing user base, and new ad formats,” the eMarketer report found. “And brands are figuring out how to reach the platform’s audience and niche communities in ways that resonate.”
Austin Tree Amigos shares its expertise: ‘You can reach a huge audience for free.’
One small business that has seen positive results by posting informational content on Reddit is Tree Amigos, an Austin, Texas-based firm that provides tree services.
Andy Anstrom, Co-Founder of Tree Amigos, posts information regularly on two local subreddits, one focused on trees specifically and another focused on Austin in general. He uses a business account, through which he posts content leveraging his expertise as an arborist.
The content often includes public-service-announcement-type posts, such as problems affecting local trees, for example, or other observations he makes about trees that might be of interest to tree-lovers in the area.
“It’s sort of current events for trees,” Anstrom told CO—. “I’m very careful to not advertise myself directly.”
He also uses a tool called If This, Then That to monitor conversations on the subreddits and trigger alerts so that he can respond to relevant posts. Users often receive email notifications when their comments generate a response from other users, and those responses include the Tree Amigos business name, said Anstrom.
“You can reach a huge audience for free,” he said.
The strategy is effective in part because Anstrom is an expert, he said, and he’s able to generate factual, informative posts quickly and easily. In addition, Austin is a tech-savvy area with an abundance of Reddit users, as well as an area where local residents have a particular fondness for trees, he said.
As a result of the popularity of his posts, Reddit users frequently recommend Tree Amigos to other users in need of tree care services, Anstrom said.
In addition, by staying active on Reddit, Tree Amigos has built up a large amount of content that Google is using to generate search responses and AI platforms are using to build their knowledge databases. Anstrom said he’s already seeing evidence of this — as of June, four potential customers who called inquiring about Tree Amigos’ services said they found out about the company through a ChatGPT search.
“That’s four leads I didn’t pay for,” he said.
Anstrom suggested that brands seeking to leverage Reddit’s discussion platforms should consider posting early in the day so that they can monitor and respond to comments throughout the rest of the day. In addition, brands need to be very careful not to be self-promotional.
“There are moderators that keep businesses from just turning it into a shopping mall with ads,” he said.
Alchemy sees ROI from paid Reddit ads
Alchemy Streaming, a startup platform that allows users to post and share videos, has focused on using paid ads on Reddit to find new potential customers for its service.
Even though it’s a video-sharing service, the company found that ads using single images outperformed video ads and also outperformed ads that contained a carousel of images, said Daniel Roberts, CEO of Alchemy Streaming. He attributed that to the fact that Reddit is more of a traditional online discussion forum than a more entertainment-driven social media platform.
“Reddit is based on sort of an old-school format,” he said. “It’s almost forum-style but obviously updated for the modern era.”
As a veteran technology entrepreneur, Roberts said he experimented with ads on other platforms in the past, but he found that Reddit delivered the best return on investment.
“One of the key things about being a startup is figuring out your costs and seeing if you can acquire customers cost-effectively,” said Roberts. “In this instance, we really wanted to fine-tune.”
With Alchemy’s limited ad budget, Roberts was attracted to the highly specific nature of Reddit’s communities and its robust user engagement. Alchemy was able to zero in on the specific subreddits that it believes are likely to be most interested in the company’s area of focus, which is AI-generated videos.
That Alchemy was able to target specific audiences helped minimize its advertising costs, said Roberts. Acquiring customers using paid ads on Reddit cost about 50% less than what Alchemy had forecasted, based on publicly available data for other streaming platforms, said Roberts.
He said that although he has engaged with Reddit more organically through informational posts in the past, at Alchemy, he’s focused almost completely on paid advertisements, other than occasional brief conversations in the comments. The ability of Reddit to flag — or even ban — brands that use the discussion forums to promote themselves dissuades brands from doing so, he said.
“If you’re selling something, at the end of the day, they sniff that out,” he said.
[Read more: Indie Game Companies Seek Growth Opportunities by Doubling as Social Platforms]
Launching a video game using Reddit
As a solo video game developer, Evan Polekoff said he wanted to be on as many social media platforms as possible, including Reddit, to promote his first game.
He recently launched the game Critter Crossfire after running a series of paid ads on Reddit that featured the best-performing segments from ads he had been placing on other social media platforms.
Polekoff, like Roberts of Alchemy Stream, found that single-image posts drive a high rate of user engagement through click-throughs. However, those users were not necessarily converting to customers, he said. Instead, he found better customer conversion rates with short-form videos that gave users a flavor of his game.
Polekoff had a goal of appearing on 7,000 user “wish lists,” which indicate a user’s stated interest in buying a video game, because that would trigger some free promotional activity on the Steam video game platform, where Critter Crossfire is available. He ended up with about 3,000 appearances on wish lists, but the learning opportunity as a first-time solo developer made the experience worthwhile, he said.
Polekoff said he also tried to participate organically by posting some short-form video content on Reddit.
“I definitely did as much as I could within the no-self-promotion policy, but I hit that wall pretty quickly and started having posts removed because of that,” he said. “Some of them did well, but they didn't convert to sales as well as the ads themselves.”
Participating in the comments on video-game developer subreddits — which are plentiful — was helpful, however, Polekoff said.
One of the key learnings that he gleaned from subreddit comments was the need to make a single-player version of the game. When he first launched demo versions of Critter Crossfire as a multiplayer game, some users commented they would like a single-player version as well, and Polekoff obliged their request by retooling the game.
“I reannounced the game and posted about it on Reddit again, started running the ads, and made a new demo, and the feedback was much more positive,” he said.
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