Reddit is shifting to a “logged-in only experience,” co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman said in a letter to shareholders this week, starting in markets outside the U.S.
Reddit users who are logged in or use the Reddit app “make up the vast majority of engagement, and over 80% of the monetization on Reddit,” Mr. Huffman said in the report for the third quarter of the fiscal year. By comparison, the amount of traffic for logged-out users has dropped.
Mr. Huffman said search referrals were down during the quarter, particularly for logged-out users and web traffic, with 1 million fewer referrals per week during October. If that rate continues, he said, the amount of daily unique users on Reddit could drop by “a low-double-digit percentage from our current base of 130 million.”
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Around 27.3 million people in the U.S. were counted as logged-out daily unique users for Reddit during the three months that ended Sept. 30, a 4% decline year-over-year. The amount of logged-in daily unique users for that period saw a 1% year-over-year increase, from 23.1 million to 23.4 million.
Reddit’s switch to only being usable for people who are logged in will start in the fourth quarter, Mr. Huffman said, in unspecified select markets. He said other ad-based platforms also have made the change over time, and said it would have a number of benefits.
“Moving to primarily logged-in will ensure our users have the best Reddit experience possible, and can find the content and communities most relevant to them. It is better for our business because we will have more signals for ads targeting, and being logged-in leads to higher engagement generally,” Mr. Huffman said.
In a post on Reddit, Mr. Huffman said that while the change goes against 20 years of allowing access for logged-out users, people should not worry about the platform soliciting their personal information.
“We don’t need your name. We don’t need to know who you are. We don’t need to know your identity. Honestly, we don’t want to know. Reddit doesn’t require this (and won’t with this change), and neither does our ads business,” Mr. Huffman said.
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