Oct 30 (Reuters) - Reddit shares tumbled 29% on Friday, marking their biggest single-day drop and hitting their lowest level in over a year, after the company warned that Google’s AI-powered search was hurting referral traffic and could shrink its user base.
The online discussion platform still appears in Google search results but is attracting fewer clicks, as users increasingly rely on the tech giant’s AI tools for direct answers.
“When more than a million search referrals a week disappear because Google’s AI answers the question itself, investors are no longer looking just at the next three or four months, but at how much of Reddit’s audience it will really own in the years ahead,” said Vitor Madeira, senior market specialist at Capital.com.
Reddit warned that its daily active unique visitors could fall by a low double-digit percentage in the fourth quarter if referral traffic kept declining.
If current losses hold, Reddit is set to lose more than $7 billion in market value and Pinterest about $900 million. The two stocks have fallen about 44% and 23%, respectively, this year through their last close.
Reddit has a 12-month forward price-to-earnings ratio of 19.03, compared with Snap’s 7.53 and Pinterest’s 8.48, according to LSEG data.
Separately, Reddit on Friday said it has extended its cloud services agreement with Google through 2029, committing to spend $580 million over three years.
At least 11 brokerages cut their price targets on Reddit, and at least 13 did so on Pinterest.
Good.
I enjoyed pre-COVID Reddit, where you could find all political stripes and religions, a virtual “melting pot”.
Today? It’s like Lemmy but with advertising. So much more homogeneous, and the moderators are deranged. Let them rule their dying empire with furry fists, have at it, it’s yours now
Reminded now, right before I left Reddit I was banned from r/pics for being a member somewhere that they don’t approve of, I can no longer recall which sub but it was lightly Republican flavored (my favorite political adversaries).
Why would they care? How would they know what the sub was intolerable without joining themselves? Why didn’t they ban themselves then? They were despoiled, like me.
Senseless. I haven’t visited since the login requirement, piss off
Reddit failed at it’s original purpose. Hope you like your yacht payments
It’s still surprising to me that 2 years later, it’s still double the value it was when it went public.
There was never any believable story where they would go public and become profitable.
Seems to me the issue here is overall strategy.
The overall strategy seemed to have been foster discussion, then sell that content to AI scrapers and search engines while also collecting ad revenue.
Problem is, if the AI search engine scrapes the answer out of the discussion, they’ll often answer the user’s question and thus you won’t get the ad revenue from the click. And if you need to log in to see the discussion you’ll lose the ad revenue from search referrals.
In short- ‘we created a business letting others cannibalize the value out of our database and now we’re shocked there’s less value in our database’.
Burn, burn, burn!
Whats the point to appear in google search, when you gonna lock your platform to have accounts to view the content… Just asking.
Hey, its rude to expect spaz to think that far
they hurt thier own traffic by banning users, and the people who use accounts to earn money through the site or OF in general, and not the propaganda bots.
reddit is basically nothing but a less featured facebook at this point. theyve killed and stifled real news and genuine discussion. all it is anymore is memes and gooner material.
It’s a pseudonymous Facebook. I still think that the Internet is better when people aren’t using their own real names.
Lol. Rofl. Roflmao.
Maybe if you’re worried about decreasing traffic don’t require an account just to read something on the internet.
“a low double-digit percentage“ sure is a funny way to say 10-49%, and that since it represents fully 40% of the possible values (also known as ”a low double-digit percent”) it is a worthless non statement.
Listen to some of their q3 earnings report if youre bored. Its obvious this little forum admin spez is way out of his depth/ competence
Reddit is set to lose more than $7 billion in market value
Good.
Too many people block ads on reddit -> block the api -> people use google search and vpns -> block search and vpns unless logged in -> people use ai instead of search to find reddit answers because reddit blocks everything –> block access even harder -> complain no one visits the site anymore -> [we are here]
You forgot banning your userbase left and right.
which funny enough made them lurkers.
Yep they hand out auto suspends and bans like it’s free candy.
I once got permabanned for harassment because I called a dude a dumbass in 2 different threads on a very small <1k daily users subreddit and they said I was “following him” and making “personal attacks”
Oh yes, I know of that very well. The admins have crazy trigger fingers.
Also, the experience of new users is just utter garbage. When I finally successfully sidestepped their detection of ban evasion (clear cookies + random user agent + VPN), I noticed how terrible the new-user experience is. I am supposed to gain karma to post anything, but I can’t get karma, because my account is too new and every post and comment is hidden or automatically removed. ??? BUT THE ACTUAL BOTS ARE JUST GIVING EACHOTHER KARMA! This bot prevention bullshit hurts only humans. Utter garbage website, it’s doomed, but I wish it’d die faster.
i created an acc after 1+years of ashadowbanned, i only occasionaly go on niche subs, then after a while i use powersuite to nuke the comments.
And canning my girl Victoria
And the reddit gifts guy.
Only thing left to block are logins.
I honestly don’t know anyone that does anymore. I tried the bs for about 5 sec before I get prompted for ads for their app.
Not sure how that pops up with origin
I still log in every now and then on a browser to read the sports subs because lemmy sucks for that, but I refuse to install that cancer of an app.
I agree Lemmy sucks for sports subs, but I refuse to log in to Reddit. Because I refuse to login it has basically become unusable – so I don’t use it.
That damn “better on the app” popup completely freezes Firefox Focus on iOS.
There are times where I search something, there appears to be a reddit thread with a descriptive answer so I tap on it, I scroll down a couple swipes and boom, popup freezes the app. Can’t do anything to make the back button appear after scrolling hid it. All I can do is force close.
On Firefox, Desktop Mode usually fixes this.
70 to go!
Don’t listen to them Reddit!
They just want to stop you WINNING - keep going where you’re going.
Have they tried making the UI shittier?
They should try alienating a bunch of their most active, long tenured users.
its peak enshittified, but i guess they can make it like tiktok, where you get interrupted every other AD posts/ai.
You say that…
I still use the app for 1 specific thing and let me tell you the iOS app (presumably their largest audience) is GARBAGE. And it gets worse every single release.
The latest release has a dead zone (!) in the list view. You’ll click a row/item and nothing happens. It only occurs after using the app for a bit and only in certain vertical place (about 20% down from the top). You have to scroll the list to be to click that item. Hilarious.
Of course all of this is on top the numerous other bugs.
Chrstian - ONE FUCKING GUY - made a superior app by himself. What did PewDiePie say, “it’s evolving, only backwards.”
I think it took them 4 years to get their video player working too. A video player.
Their video player working would be news to me in 2026. I still have to download most videos in order to watch them.
Ugh, on the theme of media, their image-hosting is so incredibly user-hostile.
I used image search to find something the other day, and the one I wanted was hosted on Reddit. But, it was impossible to see the whole image because Reddit insisted that the only way to see the image was with the whole forum around it, and the image resized to fit that view, with the top and bottom of the image cropped out. There was no way to actually see the full image with the top and bottom visible on Reddit. I had to actually download the image to see that part.
old.reddit, a clear example of don’t fix what ain’t broken
It’s still not great on mobile.
They’re appealing to a different generation users. New reddit users think old reddit is ancient outdated design. They like the new design because it’s oriented to the internet generation that uses mobile UIs.
its for the tiktok generation. this actually goes way back, when they were doing doomscrolling on another platform i was in before it was permanently shuttled.
I hate it on browser too and is why I use redlib. So much wasted space with side padding filled with useless stuff on an already small screen.
Reddit pre-IPO*
Do people on lemmy have memory loss? This isnt the first time someone claimed something old is actually new
People have been saying that the reddit app is unusable when the API pricing was announced
it’s always been total garbage, especially compared to the third party apps. some of them supported some native reddit features better than the official app.
Your mom called and she wants to know where you are.
All I get is a page telling me to login
Yeah old Reddit was locked up a few months ago. They don’t want people scraping and most new users use the ‘new’ interface.
You mean they used that as an excuse. The reality was probably that it was harder to monetize people using old reddit.
thats what they said, but it doesnt take much to make an account and scrape with that.
That might actually be an active strategy.
Making the UI worse so people have to click around more. Makes opportunity for more advertising, and makes it look like people are engaging more.
Never really thought about it that way.deleted by creator
