Overview
- Reddit announced the plan Thursday alongside Q3 earnings that showed $895 million in revenue and about 130.3 million global daily active uniques.
- The company will transition to a primarily logged-in experience, beginning tests of login requirements in select markets outside the United States in the fourth quarter, and it is rebuilding an incognito read-only mode for anonymous browsing.
- Reddit cites a fall in search referrals — more than 1 million fewer referrals per week in October — as a key reason for the change and warned that continued declines could cut daily users by a low double-digit percentage in Q4.
- The move is part of a broader strategy that pairs commercial data-licensing deals with major AI firms and legal action; Reddit said it licenses data to OpenAI and Google, is negotiating with Google, and has sued Anthropic, Perplexity and several scraping firms.
- Executives say logged-in users drive over 80% of Reddit’s monetization and that requiring accounts will give the company stronger signals for personalized ads and content, but the change may reduce casual, logged-out discovery and further constrain third-party apps and researcher access.