Reddit: ad revenue up 54% in Q3 2026, 12.8 million monthly visitors in France, the number one source behind AI answers. Why Reddit advertising is missing from your plan.
On 3 November, Reddit published an unsigned post of fewer than two hundred words on its newsroom, announcing that it is testing ads inside its own search results pages for the first time, "with a select group of eligible advertisers", as reported by PPC Land. Five days earlier, on 29 October, the same Reddit announced a third quarter of 895 million dollars in revenue, up 53%, of which 847 million in advertising, up 54%. And in March, Peec published an analysis of 30 million sources cited by ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews: the most cited domain of all is reddit.com. My view: you are looking at the only medium that is both a cheap advertising space and the raw material of artificial intelligence answers. And in almost every scale-up media plan I read, there is not a single line on it.
Reddit advertising: the figures I care about
The third-quarter shareholder letter, as read by PPC Land, says three things. One, Reddit is making money on price and on volume: advertising growth "was driven by year-over-year growth in pricing and impressions". Two, the audience has stopped growing: 130.3 million daily active uniques, exactly the same figure as the previous quarter, and a US audience down 2% year on year at 50.7 million. Three, growth is coming from abroad: 79.6 million daily users outside the United States, up 24%, and international revenue of 176 million dollars, up 67%.
Now the figure I look at first when I buy a medium: what it earns per head. Reddit makes 13.82 dollars per US user per quarter, against 2.43 dollars per international user. A ratio of nearly six. In an auction, revenue per user is the price advertisers are willing to pay to reach that user. In Europe, that price is still five to six times lower than in the United States, on the same platform, with the same formats. Last week I wrote about what the 14% inflation in Meta ad prices costs you. Reddit is the opposite: a medium where French advertisers have not arrived yet, and where the price says so.
The benchmarks published in August by Adintime, an advertising marketplace, so a seller, point the same way: a CPM between 3 and 15 dollars, median 6.50, a cost per click between 0.50 and 4 dollars, and an entry ticket of 5 dollars a day. I take these numbers as indications, not as proof. But a median CPM of 6.50 dollars is the price of DOOH, for a contact who reads, compares and asks questions about a product.
12.8 million French people, and nobody is buying them
According to Médiamétrie's "L'Année Internet", published in February and reported by Siècle Digital, Reddit entered the top 10 social networks in France for the first time, in tenth place, with 12.8 million monthly unique visitors, up 72% in a year, and an audience multiplied by five in five years. In the same ranking, X falls to 15.6 million monthly visitors, down 16%. If both curves hold, Reddit overtakes X in France within twelve months: that is my extrapolation, not Médiamétrie's. The r/France subreddit has more than 2.5 million members, and Reddit only ran its first French advertising campaign in July 2025, in Paris, Lyon and Marseille, according to Les Gens d'Internet. An audience the size of X's, never sold to a French advertiser before last year.
One caveat straight away: 12.8 million visitors are not 12.8 million accounts. A large part of that audience arrives from Google, reads a thread and leaves without logging in. Adintime estimates French monthly users at between two and five million, with no published methodology. The truth sits between the two, and it is moving: Reddit says it will test, from this quarter and outside the United States, a logged-in-only experience, "because we will have more signals for ads targeting", and reminds investors that logged-in and app users account for "over 80% of the monetization". Translation: the French audience will shrink in number and grow in value. That is exactly the moment when a medium is cheap.
The medium AI cites: what it changes for your brand
Here is why I do not treat Reddit as one more social network. Peec's analysis, published on 31 March on 30 million US sources, ranks Reddit first or second on every one of the five engines tested: first on Gemini and Perplexity, second behind Wikipedia on ChatGPT, second behind YouTube on AI Overviews and AI Mode. Otterly's study, run in January and February on more than a million citations and reported by Something Inc., reaches the same result: Reddit first on ChatGPT and Perplexity, behind YouTube on AI Overviews. 5WPR's index, on 680 million citations, credits it with around 40% of all assistant citations. I do not take that last figure literally, the methods differ too much. But three studies, three methods, one conclusion: when someone asks an AI which tool to choose, which neobank to open, which mattress brand to buy, the answer is built in good part from what people have written on Reddit.
I have already explained why offline brand awareness is the best lever for visibility in AI: the models repeat what people say about you. Reddit is where people say it in writing, in detail, with arguments, and where the models go to read it. A scale-up with no conversation about it on Reddit does not exist for Perplexity. A scale-up whose three most visible threads are complaints has a problem that neither Google Ads nor Meta will fix. And it is fragile: 5WPR notes that Reddit's share of ChatGPT citations fell from 60% to 10% in six weeks after a parameter change at Google. So I do not build a strategy on a citation percentage. I build on something obvious: the conversations exist, machines read them, and you are not there.
My rule for Reddit
Two lines in the plan, never one. A media line: campaigns targeted by community and by keyword, not by profile, bought on CPM or CPC in the subreddits where my target already asks its questions, with a test budget of 3,000 to 5,000 euros over six weeks. A presence line: an account in the brand's name that answers real questions, takes the criticism and never hides behind fake users. A brand caught writing its own reviews on Reddit gets banned by the platform and punished by the community, and both stay online for the AI to read. And a measurement of my own: brand searches and mentions in ChatGPT and Perplexity answers, recorded before and after, not the sales house's dashboard.
Who should go, and how
B2B and SaaS. Software buyers compare on Reddit before they call a salesperson, and they do it with a candour no G2 review reaches. It is the natural extension of what I argue about educating rather than selling in B2B: teach in public instead of hiding a white paper behind a form. For Medical Pro, we built B2B healthcare acquisition among radiologists and doctors with LinkedIn and content; the method is the same, the community changes.
Fintech and products the ad platforms restrict. People compare their neobank and their broker in writing on Reddit before opening an account, and it is one more door for the categories Meta filters: I have described how to acquire when ad platforms say no to your product. For Deblock, we delivered more than 30 million impressions by surrounding the metro and geotargeting mobile within 100 metres; awareness built in the street ends up as a question asked in a thread, and that is where the decision is made.
Gaming and apps. This is what we are working on right now for a competitive gaming platform: its future players are not on LinkedIn, and they spend their time in communities organised by game, by genre and by language. Reddit lets you buy those communities one by one, and its video ad revenue more than doubled in a year according to the shareholder letter. A round of pre-launch creative tests costs a fraction of what it costs on TikTok, with comments that tell you why a creative does not work.
What I tell founders
Reddit is not a medium for everyone, and I will never put a mass-media budget on it: 130 million daily users worldwide is thirty times fewer than Meta, and the platform itself warns that its audience could fall "by a low-double-digit percentage" in the fourth quarter if the decline in Google referrals continues, more than a million weekly visits lost in October. Steve Huffman replies that "AI search solves a different problem than Reddit" and that search referrals "don't determine our relevancy". He is right on the substance, and he has just opened advertising in internal search, more than 80 million weekly searchers, to prove it. In eighteen months, Reddit will sell at the price of a medium that knows what its users are looking for. Today, it sells at the price of a forum. In between is the window I like: an under-bought medium, high in intent, whose content feeds the answers your customers read in ChatGPT. The media mix simulator will tell you what 5% of your social budget represents. And if you want to know what Reddit says about you today, and what the AI retains from it, that is the first thing I look at in a free audit.
