Reddit chief executive Steve Huffman told investors the company will move to a logged-in only experience, ending two decades of open browsing, with tests in select markets outside the United States in the fourth quarter before any wider rollout. Logged-in users already account for more than 80 percent of monetisation, he said, and requiring sign-in improves advertising signals, personalisation and control over access to Reddit’s data corpus, most unauthorised scraping of which happens through logged-out access.
The reason is measurable. Search referrals fell by more than one million a week on average during October, United States daily active uniques fell 2 percent to 50.7 million in the third quarter, the first decline since Reddit’s 2024 listing, and Huffman warned total daily active uniques could fall by a low double digit percentage in the fourth quarter from about 130 million if referral traffic keeps falling. “The reality is, the AI mode does not drive traffic, not for us and not to anybody,” he said. “Google is crawling us as hard as ever, so the demand hasn’t changed from their point of view either.”
Shares fell 18 percent in extended trading despite third quarter revenue growth of 53 percent year on year and trailing twelve month revenue crossing 3 billion dollars, with a 5 billion dollar internal target named by finance chief Drew Vollero. The market is pricing the traffic exposure, not the current quarter.
Reddit sits in an unusual position in this shift. It licenses its corpus to Google and OpenAI, the Google deal reportedly worth about 60 million dollars a year, and it is suing Anthropic, Perplexity and three scraping companies over unauthorised collection. Walling off logged-out browsing defends both businesses at once, the licensing value of the corpus and the advertising value of signed-in attention, at the cost of the casual reach that built the platform.