The internet's biggest message board, now a 30% net margin ad business. The catch: its visitors arrive from Google, and Google traffic is falling.
Q3 2026 shareholder letter- Revenue
- $895M in July to Sept 2026, up 53% on a year ago.
- Profit
- +$676M operating income in the first nine months of 2026.
- Debt
- $0 no borrowings, $3.03B of cash and securities.
- Watch
- Down 10%+? daily users may fall a low double-digit percent in Q4 as search traffic drops.
- AI
- Sells its data licenses posts to AI firms; nearly all of that value comes from two partners.
- Control
- 75% of the votes can be cast by CEO Steve Huffman.
- Hiring
- 113 → 130 remote listings since Oct 10.
Almost all of it is ads.
Reddit makes 94% of its money selling ads next to conversations. The rest is mostly licensing its archive of posts to AI companies, plus small sales of Premium and Gold to users.
- 1Twenty years of human conversation, and growingReddit added another billion posts and comments to its archive in Q3 2026, and AI firms pay to license it.Q3 2026 shareholder letter
- 2Half a billion people a week515.2M weekly unique visitors in Q3 2026, up 16%, with 326.7M outside the US.Q3 2026 earnings release
- 3A place people search for real answersOver 80 million people searched on Reddit each week in Q4 2025, and Reddit Answers, its AI search, now sits in core search.10-K FY2025, business
| Company | Worth | Revenue | Growth | Per employee | Paid per $1 | Stock, 1 yr |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $17.6B | $3.09B | +62% | $1.21M | $5.99 | −56% | |
| Meta | $1572B | $242B | +28% | $3.06M | $6.55 | −8% |
| $10.9B | $4.68B | +15% | $0.89M | $2.41 | −40% | |
| Snap | $9.03B | $6.35B | +13% | $1.21M | $1.40 | −30% |
| Alphabet | $3412B | $471B | +22% | $2.47M | $7.35 | −4% |
- Reddit
- Worth
- $17.6B
- Revenue
- $3.09B
- Growth
- +62%
- Per employee
- $1.21M
- Paid per $1
- $5.99
- Stock, 1 yr
- −56%
- Meta
- Worth
- $1572B
- Revenue
- $242B
- Growth
- +28%
- Per employee
- $3.06M
- Paid per $1
- $6.55
- Stock, 1 yr
- −8%
- Pinterest
- Worth
- $10.9B
- Revenue
- $4.68B
- Growth
- +15%
- Per employee
- $0.89M
- Paid per $1
- $2.41
- Stock, 1 yr
- −40%
- Snap
- Worth
- $9.03B
- Revenue
- $6.35B
- Growth
- +13%
- Per employee
- $1.21M
- Paid per $1
- $1.40
- Stock, 1 yr
- −30%
- Alphabet
- Worth
- $3412B
- Revenue
- $471B
- Growth
- +22%
- Per employee
- $2.47M
- Paid per $1
- $7.35
- Stock, 1 yr
- −4%
Investors pay $5.99 for every dollar Reddit brings in. Its peers here range from $1.40 to $7.35, close to their median of $4.48.
Reddit brought in $895 million in 92 days.
That is about $310 million more than the same three months a year earlier. Each of its 2,555 employees brought in about $0.86 million over the year, about $2,360 a day.
Revenue is not profit. It is the money that came in before Reddit pays any of its costs.
10-Q Q3 2026; employees from 10-K FY2025 (Dec 31, 2025)From losing $561 million to making $442 million.
Revenue more than doubled in two years. In FY2025 it kept 20 cents of every revenue dollar as operating profit.
- FY2023: lost 17¢ of every $1
- FY2024: lost 43¢ of every $1
- FY2025: kept 20¢ of every $1
Meta and Alphabet bring in more per person than Reddit; Pinterest and Snap less.
- Meta$3.06M
- Alphabet$2.47M
- Reddit$1.21M
- Snap$1.21M
- Pinterest$0.89M
Reddit has a $500M credit line it has not drawn on, apart from $5.7M of letters of credit. Money is not the risk here. Traffic is.
What the filings say, and what we think it means.
The fact is the filing's. The read, in italics, is ours.
- 01Watch
Reddit plans to make most of the site logged-in only.
Q3 2026 shareholder letterLogged-out visitors were 76.8M of 130.3M daily users in Q3 2026. Reddit will test a logged-in-only site in some non-US markets in Q4, then decide on a global version.
The biggest product change since the IPO. It trades casual readers from Google for signed-in users who are worth more to advertisers. Expect the headline user count to shrink.
- 02Watch
Google traffic is falling, and fast.
Q3 2026 shareholder letterSearch referrals fell more than 1 million a week on average in October. Reddit says daily users could fall by a low double-digit percent in Q4 from about 130M if that continues.
Reddit relies on search engines such as Google for much of its traffic. A drop it cannot control is the core risk to the business.
- 03Watch
US daily users shrank while US revenue jumped.
Q3 2026 earnings releaseUS daily users fell 2% to 50.7M, but US revenue per user rose 53% to $13.82.
Growth now comes from charging more per visitor, not from more Americans showing up. That works until ad prices stop rising.
- 04Good
From big losses to a 30% net margin in two years.
10-K FY2025; 10-Q Q3 2026Operating income was $442M in 2025 after a $561M loss in 2024, a year swollen by $802M of IPO stock pay. Q3 2026 net income was $283M on $895M of revenue.
The turnaround is real and fast. Companies earning this much tend to keep hiring rather than cut.
- 05Neutral
It pays almost no income tax, and a one-time gain may come.
10-K FY2025, income taxes noteTax expense was $11.5M on $751.6M of pretax profit in nine months. A $779M valuation allowance sits against old tax losses, including $1.7B of federal losses.
Like other newly profitable firms, Reddit could one day release that allowance and book a large one-time paper gain. If so, ignore it when judging profits.
- 06Watch
The CEO controls about three quarters of the vote.
10-K FY2025; 10-Q Q3 2026, related partiesThrough voting agreements, Steve Huffman could vote about 75% of the voting power at Dec 31, 2025. Advance, owner of Conde Nast, holds about 22% of the shares and is a related party.
Outside shareholders have little say. Strategy, and any sale of the company, is effectively Huffman's call.
- 07Watch
AI licensing rests on two buyers, and one may balk.
10-K FY2025, risk factors; WinBuzzer citing WSJ, Jul 23, 2026Substantially all licensing contract value comes from two partners. Google's deal began Feb 2024. In July 2026 the WSJ reported renewal talks with Google had hit friction.
Licensing is small, $48M of other revenue in Q3, but it is the clearest price on Reddit's data. Losing one buyer would show in the line at once.
- 08Neutral
A shareholder suit over Google AI Overviews is still alive.
10-Q Q3 2026, commitments and contingenciesFiled June 2025. Dismissed with leave to amend on Aug 13, 2026; a second amended complaint came Oct 23, 2026. Separately, the UK ICO fined Reddit 14.5M pounds in Feb 2026, under appeal.
Neither is large next to $3B of cash. The suit matters because it is about the same Google risk now in the numbers.
- 09Neutral
A $1B buyback, but the share count still rose.
10-Q Q3 2026, stockholders' equity noteReddit bought back $340M of stock in nine months under a $1.0B plan from Feb 2026. Shares outstanding still rose 1.9% in a year, and stock pay was $300.6M.
Buybacks are mostly soaking up stock handed to employees. Equity is a real part of pay here.
- 10Neutral
Google is its cloud vendor, data buyer and traffic source.
10-Q Q3 2026; 8-K, Aug 12, 2026In 2026 Reddit committed $880M to AWS and $580M to Google Cloud, both through 2029. Its Chief Legal Officer left in Sept 2026; Paul Cappuccio is expected to replace him.
One company is a supplier, customer and gatekeeper at once. That tangle shapes every renewal talk.
Data is paid 42% over market. Engineering, 19% over.
We save every company's roles, pay by team and level, AI share and churn every day, so each month this page can say more. Sparklines use their own scale.
Can AI agents do business with Reddit?
We checked the agent payment programs, developer docs and site rules an AI assistant would meet.
Sells to AI, blocks the rest. Agents get in by paying, not by crawling.
Still Remote read- YesLicenses its content to AI companiesGoogle got Data API access in Feb 2024 to train on and show Reddit content. OpenAI and others also pay, per AP.Google, Feb 22, 2024
- MixedLets AI crawlers read its siterobots.txt reads "User-agent: *" then "Disallow: /". Every bot is blocked by default; access is through paid deals.checked Oct 31, 2026
- MixedDocs that AI tools can readDeveloper docs publish llms.txt and llms-full.txt. reddit.com/llms.txt returns a bot check page, not a file.checked Oct 31, 2026
- YesAn MCP server for agentsThe Devvit developer platform ships an MCP server for coding agents (docs search and app logs). No official MCP for ads or content was found.checked Oct 31, 2026
- YesGoes to court against AI scrapersSued Anthropic in June 2025 and Perplexity plus three scraping firms in Oct 2025, alleging unlawful scraping.AP via BNN Bloomberg, Oct 22, 2025
- Not foundAgent shopping or ad-buying programsNo Reddit tie to Google AP2, OpenAI or Stripe agent checkout, or an official ads agent toolkit. Third-party Reddit Ads MCP servers exist.searched Oct 31, 2026
Where Reddit puts AI to work.
- 1Reddit Answers, its own AI searchAn AI tool that answers questions from Reddit posts. In 2025 it moved into core search and into languages beyond English.10-K FY2025, business
- 2AI writes code; review is the bottleneckHuffman said in 2026 he no longer writes code by hand, and that review and deployment now limit Reddit's engineers, as reported. Its feed model trains on 20x more data.OfficeChai, Apr 1, 2026; Q3 2026 letter
- 3Hiring graduates, not cutting for AIHuffman said in March 2026 that AI gains mean Reddit will build more, and that it will hire new graduates heavily, especially engineers.Entrepreneur, Mar 23, 2026
More listings than on Sep 7, led by engineering.
What Reddit puts on its own channel.
Short videos from Reddit's official YouTube channel, played here. We only use a channel that links reddit.com and carries the company's name.
- Some of the Scariest Small Towns stories. #short #shorts #shortvideo1.6 thousand views
- People who live rurally, what’s the scariest experience that you can’t explain? #Shorts #shorts876 views
- Truck drivers, what's a creepy story you've got from the middle of nowhere? #Short #Shorts1.5 thousand views
- What is the creepiest thing that’s happened to you that you still think about? #Short #Shorts1 thousand views
- Rural folk, what is the most creepy thing you've seen. #Short #Shorts3 thousand views
Your view of the next year, in a share price.
A way to think, not a forecast, and not investment advice.
- Growth
- How much bigger revenue gets in a year. More revenue to multiply.
- Paid per $1 of revenue
- The mood dial. High when investors expect fast growth and future profit, low when they doubt it. Reddit sits at $8.01; the peers' median is $4.48.
- Share count
- Stock pay and converting notes add shares, so each is a smaller slice. Buybacks do the opposite. Last year Reddit's share count changed +1.9%.
- The analyst range
- 36 analysts publish a 12-month target, from $110 to $303. It is where Wall Street sits, not where the stock must go.
Growth and valuation hold, and the share count keeps rising at last year's rate. This lands near the analysts' average of $166.
Your $100,000 grant today would be worth $166,180 in 12 months in this world, before taxes and vesting.
A way to think, not a forecast, and not investment advice.
10-Q Q3 2026; Q3 2026 earnings releaseThe signals, and which way they push.
- HeadwindSearch traffic is draining away.
Search referrals fell over 1M a week in October, mostly logged-out web visits, and management warned of a Q4 user decline.
- TailwindAds keep getting more valuable.
Ad revenue rose 54% to $847M in Q3. Video ad revenue more than doubled, and Reddit Max campaigns reached general release.
- TailwindGrowth has moved abroad.
International daily users rose 24% to 79.6M and international revenue 67% to $176.1M, while US users fell 2%.
- HeadwindThe Google data deal is in play.
The WSJ reported in July 2026 that renewal talks had hit friction, and Reddit weighed limiting Google's structured access.
- TailwindBuilding more, not cutting.
Headcount rose from 2,233 to 2,555 in 2025, R&D spend rose 34% in Q3, and the CEO says AI means building more products.
Where Reddit ends up, if we had to bet.
Our calls, not facts. Each one is tied to something that already happened, so you can judge the reasoning.
- 1
Reddit is a logged-in app, and logged-out Google readers are a small slice of its users.
Likely 72%ProductsReddit says it will move primarily to logged-in, starting with tests in Q4 2026. Logged-out visitors are 59% of daily users today, so the mix has to change.
Q3 2026 shareholder letter - 2
Licensing to AI firms grows into a line Reddit reports on its own.
Coin flip 50%AIOther revenue was $48M in Q3 2026, up 35%, and two partners hold almost all licensing value. Reddit is suing scrapers to keep its data scarce, but the Google renewal shows buyers push back.
10-K FY2025; Q3 2026 release - 3
Users outside the US bring in a third of Reddit's revenue.
Coin flip 50%ExpansionInternational revenue grew 67% to $176.1M, about a fifth of the total. Revenue per international user is $2.43, against $13.82 in the US.
Q3 2026 earnings release - 4
Courts settle that scraping public posts for AI needs a license, which favors Reddit.
Coin flip 50%RegulationReddit has sued Anthropic and Perplexity over scraping. Privacy regulators are active too: the UK ICO fined it 14.5M pounds in 2026.
AP via BNN Bloomberg; 10-Q Q3 2026 - 5
Reddit is bought by a bigger tech or media company.
Long shot 16%M&AHuffman can cast about 75% of the votes, so any sale is his decision. Advance holds about 22% of the shares, and Reddit has no debt forcing a deal.
10-K FY2025, risk factors
Read by the Still Remote research agent on November 1, 2026 from the sources linked on this page. Facts and scenarios only, not investment advice.