{"id":661039,"date":"2026-10-29T22:04:12","date_gmt":"2026-10-29T22:04:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/661039\/"},"modified":"2026-10-29T22:04:12","modified_gmt":"2026-10-29T22:04:12","slug":"as-search-traffic-dries-up-reddit-announces-its-shifting-to-a-logged-in-experience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/661039\/","title":{"rendered":"As search traffic dries up, Reddit announces it’s shifting to a logged-in experience"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reddit has long attracted millions of users to its site through Google, with many even appending the word \u201cReddit\u201d to their search queries for better answers. But as search traffic dries up amid the shift to AI-powered search, Reddit is rethinking its relationship with the open internet. In its third-quarter earnings call<\/a> on Thursday, the company announced it\u2019s transitioning to a primarily \u201clogged-in experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

The move is designed to protect its data from AI scraping, allowing the company to instead forge lucrative licensing deals with model providers. But just as important, such a shift could help Reddit to increase its revenue even as it faces daily active user declines in its largest market, the U.S.<\/p>\n

Overall, Reddit\u2019s global daily active users were flat quarter-over-quarter in Q3, reaching 130.3 million, while U.S. daily active users dropped from 53.2 million in Q2 to 50.7 million in Q3 and were down 2% year-over-year. <\/p>\n

\"\"Image Credits:Reddit<\/p>\n

The company is not alone in seeing such declines; the shift to an AI-centered web has impacted most websites and publishers by now, leading to fewer click-throughs, as AI summaries provide answers that don\u2019t require website visits and Google\u2019s traditional \u201cten blue links\u201d have reduced relevance. (The change is now even impacting Google\u2019s bottom line<\/a>, its earnings<\/a> revealed.)<\/p>\n

But at Reddit\u2019s scale, the numbers associated with such a decline are enormous. The company said search traffic referrals dropped by more than 1 million referrals on average per week in October. It warned that if the trend continues, daily active users could decline to a low-double-digit percentage by next quarter. (To play that out: a hypothetical 10% to 12% decline could bring Reddit to roughly 115 million to 117 million daily actives, down from 130.3 million in Q3. That\u2019s a huge drop!)<\/p>\n

At the same time, Reddit has gotten significantly better at monetizing its audience even as its growth weakens. Revenue increased 53% year-over-year to $895 million, ahead of Wall Street\u2019s expectations of about $875 million. Net income rose 74% to $283 million. Advertising revenue grew 54% to $847 million while nonadvertising revenue, which includes its AI data-licensing business, grew 35% year-over-year to $48 million.<\/p>\n

And despite a 2% year-over-year decline in U.S. daily users, Reddit\u2019s average revenue per daily active user in the U.S. rose 53% to $13.82. Globally, average revenue per daily active user increased 36% year-over-year to $6.87.<\/p>\n

Shifting to a logged-in experience could boost those numbers even higher because logged-in users are typically worth more to advertisers. <\/p>\n

Unlike the logged-out users who often find their way to the site via search, logged-in users provide more signals about their interests and behaviors, which helps to better target and personalize ads. <\/p>\n

Those same signals would also help Reddit provide a more personalized experience to its users, which includes personalized feeds, recommendations of new communities to subscribe to, and pushes to vote, comment, participate, and more. (This also includes pushing recommendations to its new algorithmic \u201cFor You\u201d feed, announced yesterday<\/a>, which will combine posts from communities users belong to alongside other recommendations based on their interests.)<\/p>\n

\"\"Image Credits:Reddit<\/p>\n

Still, a change of this magnitude could be the canary in the coal mine for the open web.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know about you, but as someone whose life has been defined by the open internet, it\u2019s a big change for me,\u201d wrote Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman in a post published on Reddit\u2019s site<\/a>. \u201cBut I\u2019ve come to the conclusion that this is the right decision for our platform and the right decision for our business,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The company notes that the shift to the logged-in experience will not be an overnight change; it will first run tests in select markets outside the U.S. in the fourth quarter. It doesn\u2019t yet have a timeline for when the change will be rolled out to all its users worldwide. It also acknowledged that access to a logged-out front page is important. <\/p>\n

Plus, Reddit pointed out that being logged in doesn\u2019t mean having to give up anonymity, nor will it remove its option to browse anonymously through its \u201cincognito mode\u201d experience, which is being rebuilt. <\/p>\n

\u201cThere are still plenty of questions that are unanswered, particularly around where the boundaries should be between logged-in and logged-out experiences,\u201d Hoffman wrote. \u201cThis is a big evolution for Reddit, and not one we\u2019re taking lightly. But I believe it\u2019s the right next step for the platform and for our future.\u201d<\/p>\n

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Reddit has long attracted millions of users to its site through Google, with many even appending the word…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":661040,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,85,46,3123,1367,125],"class_list":["post-661039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-reddit","tag-search","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/661039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=661039"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/661039\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/661040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=661039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=661039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=661039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}