Reddit is going logged-in-only, and it will test the switch outside the US first
In its Q3 shareholder letter on 29 October, CEO Steve Huffman said Reddit is shifting to a logged-in-only experience, with full tests in select markets outside the US starting in Q4. Search referrals fell by more than a million visits a week in October.
Reading Reddit anonymously is on its way out. In the third-quarter shareholder letter published on Thursday 29 October, chief executive Steve Huffman wrote that Reddit is shifting to a “logged-in-only experience”. Full tests start in the fourth quarter in select markets outside the United States.
Reddit has not said which markets. What it did say is that the results will shape an “optimized version” of logged-in-only Reddit to roll out globally.
Why now
Huffman gives four reasons. Logged-in users get a better experience and find the right communities, Reddit gets more signals for ad targeting, it protects what he calls an extremely valuable corpus of data, and it is better placed for the regulation coming in several countries. In a separate post on Reddit itself he added that the vast majority of unauthorised access, meaning scraping by bots, comes through the logged-out site.
There is a number underneath all of this. Traffic referred by search engines fell “meaningfully” in the third quarter, mostly among logged-out visitors. In October the drop passed a million referrals a week, and the letter concedes that if the trend holds, daily users could fall by a low double-digit percentage in Q4.
The business itself is not the problem. Revenue rose 53% year on year to $895 million and Reddit averaged 130.3 million daily active uniques. In the US, though, that daily figure is already down 2%.
What changes if you only read
For plenty of people Reddit is where a Google search ends up once they type “reddit” after the question. Huffman says the logged-out front page stays “useful and important” and that people arriving from an outside link should still see what they were sent to. Beyond that, nothing is fixed yet.
The letter points out that pretty much every major ad-funded platform has already made this switch. It fits a wider tightening, at a time when governments such as Greece’s are making platforms check who gets in.
By Oliver Grant
Illustration: Tugadaily
