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Reddit reveals daily active user count for the first time: 52 million

Reddit reveals daily active user count for the first time: 52 million

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Small in comparison but growing quickly

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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Reddit revealed that it now has 52 million daily users, and the number appears to be growing quickly. Reddit told The Wall Street Journal that daily usage grew 44 percent year over year for October, a sizable increase on a metric that speaks to just how essential a product it is to its users.

The number is small compared to other social media rivals, though. Twitter has 187 million daily users, Snap has 249 million, and Facebook has 1.82 billion. But at their larger sizes, none of those services are seeing daily usage grow as rapidly as Reddit. In their most recent quarters, Twitter reported 29 percent year-over-year growth, Snap reported 18 percent, and Facebook reported 12 percent.

Daily usage of Reddit is being shared for the first time “as a more accurate reflection of our user growth and to be more in-line with industry reporting,” the company told the Journal. (It is true that social media companies tend to use daily users as their preferred metric; though Twitter, for instance, only switched away from reporting monthly users because that number was dipping, while daily users was growing.) The other reason for the change was to focus on a number that would better help to grow Reddit’s advertising business.

Reddit has focused on monthly usage in the past. This time last year, the company said it had 430 million monthly users, with 30 percent year-over-year growth. The quick growth has come during a period that Reddit began to iterate more rapidly on its service. It rolled out a significant redesign in 2018 and this year has added features like galleries and polls. The company has also gotten more serious about cracking down on some of the problematic communities hosted on its site, which should help to make the service friendlier to both advertisers and users overall.