At the end of 2023, just before going public, $Reddit(RDDT.US) had 73.1 million DAU users globally, with nearly half of them in the United States. Among similar community platforms, those that are already listed, such as Pinterest, also reached 130 million DAU by the end of 2023.

However, in terms of monetization capability, Reddit falls significantly short, with revenues of only 800 million in 2023, while Pinterest had over 3 billion, a difference of three times. Why is the efficiency so poor?

On one hand, there is the platform's inherent "insufficiency," and on the other hand, there is the management's "lack of action."

Compared to other social platforms, one of Reddit's biggest characteristics is its "populism," which weakens the influence of the platform and KOLs, allowing users to have a good experience, but this clearly affects the advertising effectiveness for businesses. Reddit has also maintained an anonymous social approach, where users cannot follow or track each other over the long term.

On the other hand, there has been turmoil in the management. Reddit has gone through three rounds of management changes, and before 2011, it was mired in content review controversies (having not established a content review mechanism, allowing users to freely post toxic content such as pornography, gambling, and drugs, which affected advertisers' willingness to invest, and the initial regulation of content faced resistance from long-time users). It wasn't until 2016 that the official app was launched, and even before 2018, an advertising system had not been properly established. These rounds of turmoil directly led to Reddit missing key strategic opportunities during the industry transformation period, slowing down its growth and normal commercialization pace.