Australia comes in as Reddit’s 4th largest user base, and with the kind of growth the company is seeing, it’s little surprise that the company is opening a physical presence here in Sydney. The move comes following offices opened in Canada earlier this year and the UK in September last year.
The Australian office will comprise community, engineering and sales staff, under the leadership of David Ray who joins the business from WooliesX (with a background at other large tech firms).
Reddit has more than 52 million active daily users across more than 100,000 communities. In Australia, user activity mimics global trends with gaming, crypto and entertainment among the most popular interest groups, but there is a clear local twist. r/australia, the community of 700,000 members where you can “chew the fat about Australia and Australians”, is the most popular subreddit among Australian users, with r/ausfinance and r/asx_bets following closely behind.
In a surprise to no one, r/afl and r/nrl also make the Top 10 Australian communities list, joining Reddit’s ever-popular Sports Interest Group which attracted more than one billion screen views globally, for the month of April 2021 alone. Local takes on leading global communities are also popular among Australian Reddit users, with r/askanaustralian, r/australianteachers and r/ausproperty among the fastest growing communities for Australian users in 2021.
Why open a local office in Australia? The sales team seems the most obvious answer – with such a large user base here, it makes sense to have a local sales team that can source the right kind of advertising for the business to engage a local audience. Having community staff here will help too, as moderation of local communities will always benefit from someone who lives in and understands the local flavour.
At an average of 31 minutes per day, Australians spend more time on Reddit than they do Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter and Pinterest and they collectively contribute 158 million posts, comments and votes on the platform every month. With 90% of users under 50, that’s a big target audience, so the move makes sense.
