Digital 2018: Reddit Overtakes Twitter
The number of people using Reddit has surged in the past few months, and the platform now reports as many active users as Twitter.
A rapid growth spurt
The company’s own data indicates that average monthly active users (MAUs) have jumped from 250 million in November last year, to 330 million by early April 2018.
That’s an increase of more than 30 percent in less than 6 months, and puts the platform in equal 11th place in our new global social media platform ranking (see chart above).
And it’s not just Reddit’s own data that suggests the platform is doing well.
The latest global website ranking from Alexa – based on monthly site traffic – shows that Reddit.com is the sixth most-visited website in the world.
The web’s most engaging content?
What’s more, Alexa’s data suggests that people spend more time on Reddit each day than they spend on the websites of any other top social platform.
The average user spends 15 minutes 47 seconds on Reddit.com each day, compared to just over 11 minutes for visitors to Facebook.com, and 6 minutes 23 seconds on Twitter.com (note that these times are based solely on visits to the platform’s websites though, and don’t factor time spent on the platforms’ mobile apps).
To put this in context, even if Reddit’s 330 million active users only visit the site once each month, the combined time that those users will spend on the platform this year will be equivalent to almost 120,000 years of human time.
Based on our understanding of how often people visit Reddit though, this figure is likely much higher.
Reddit isn’t just doing well from a social perspective, either.
Visitors spend longer on Reddit.com than any other site in Alexa’s ranking of the 50 most-visited sites on the web, regardless of category – even compared to top ‘adult’ sites.
Based on these numbers, Reddit can credibly claim that it’s even more engaging than porn.
For more insights into the latest developments across all things digital in Q2 2018, dig in to my new Global Digital Statshot report:
This article first appeared in Simon Kemp's column on The Next Web. They’ve kindly let us re-share it here.