Reddit is now crushing it thanks to AI

The social network’s revenue and user numbers are soaring.

11/1/24 12:58PM

When Reddit filed to go public in early 2024, I thought its valuation seemed steep. According to Reddit’s S-1, the company had made $804 million in revenue in 2023, up ~20% from the year before, but it had a $90 million net loss, and it had never been profitable. Its $9.5 billion market cap at the end of its first trading day felt high.

Additionally, while the S-1 mentioned “artificial intelligence” and “AI” 63 times, it wasn’t clear how artificial intelligence would generate higher revenues or user growth. The company claimed that its content is “particularly important for artificial intelligence (‘AI’) — it is a foundational part of how many of the leading large language models (‘LLMs’) have been trained,” and it planned to “drive growth in advertising revenue by focusing on initiatives to support advertising improvements, including increased use of artificial intelligence in our advertising solutions,” but every company has been claiming that AI would be transformative for their businesses, despite actual results being mixed.

After Reddit’s earnings report earlier this week, I take back any of my concerns from earlier this year. After reporting a killer quarter on Tuesday, Reddit’s stock jumped as high as 48% on Wednesday, reaching $121 per share after ending Tuesday at ~$82.

Some highlights from the earnings report:

Daily Active Uniques climbed by 47% year over year to 97.2 million
Revenue increased by 68% to $348.4 million
Achieved first-ever GAAP profitability with $29.9 million in net income

One of the key drivers of Reddit’s recent success? AI, specifically with translation tools. From Reddit’s Q3 shareholder letter:

“This year, we started using AI to translate Reddit’s corpus into other languages, making it more accessible for non-English speakers to enjoy in their native languages. After promising results with French in the first half of this year, we expanded our coverage to include Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and German. This quarter, machine translation drove four times more users than last quarter, and based on the success we’ve seen so far, we plan to expand machine translation to over 30 countries through 2025. As Reddit becomes a truly global platform, we are focused on ensuring everyone, regardless of their language, can participate in and benefit from the communities on Reddit.”

Reddit’s AI translation tools have made the platform more language agnostic, as users from different markets can now read more content, leading to an explosion in user growth. Interestingly, the AI boom seems to have created a tailwind for Reddit discoverability through Google Search as well:

“Reddit’s influence continues to grow across the broader internet. In 2024 so far, ‘Reddit’ was the sixth most Googled word in the U.S., underscoring that when people are looking for answers, advice, or community, they’re turning to Reddit.”

My hypothesis here is that the recent proliferation of AI content that we’ve seen has led internet users to seek out “real” content written by other humans. It’s a well-known meme at this point that we have all found the answer to some super-niche, ultra-specific question in a Reddit post from years ago, but the recent proliferation of AI content has made Reddit even more valuable.

An increasing amount of content on social media, and the internet in general, is AI-generated, SEO-optimized slop, but Reddit’s structure — different topic-based subreddits governed by moderators — has helped it prioritize human-created content. Additionally, people can more easily find answers and expertise on specific topics in different subreddits, while Google Search is hit-or-miss and generative-AI tools like ChatGPT are still prone to hallucinations.

Reddit is experiencing an incredible AI flywheel: distrust in AI content is causing internet users to add “Reddit” to their Google Searches to get real answers, and the company is leveraging its own AI tools to make its content more accessible. With its market cap now double its $9.5 billion valuation after its IPO, Reddit has proven to be one of the more successful “AI” stories so far.

Max Knoblauch19h

The Trump administration is reportedly planning a 50% made-in-America requirement for USMCA tariff relief

Qualifying for USMCA-related lower tariffs may soon require more US-made vehicle components, according to reporting by The Wall Street Journal.

The Trump administration is reportedly planning to introduce a 50% US content requirement for vehicles covered by the trade pact to receive lower tariffs. The content would be measured by cost, according to the WSJ.

There currently isn’t any US-specific requirement for those lower tariff rates, but in order to receive preferential tariffs, vehicles are must contain at least 75% regional content (components made in North America). Per Reuters reporting, the Trump admin is seeking to raise the regional requirement to 82%.

These reported plans are subject to change as the US negotiates USMCA terms with Mexico over the next few months.

Overall, Tesla will likely have the easiest time qualifying for any stricter requirements. The automaker’s vehicles contained the highest amount of US/Canadian content in 2025, according to American University research. Ford, GM, and Stellantis all scored lower.

Notably: the underlying government data that many domestic content measurements rely on intentionally combines US and Canadian components, so it’s difficult to know exactly how much of any given vehicle is specifically US-made.

Exclusive | Trump Administration Wants Autos Under USMCA to Be at Least 50% Made in America

These reported plans are subject to change as the US negotiates USMCA terms with Mexico over the next few months.

Tom Jones5/29/26

The $640,000 Luce makes the average Ferrari look like a bargain

Put aside the shape; put aside the smoothing out of Ferrari’s iconic sharp edges; put aside, even, the calls from former Chairman and President Luca Cordero di Montezemolo to “take the Prancing Horse off.” On the grounds of price alone, Luce detractors might have a point.

By now, many of us will have read the criticisms of Ferrari’s first fully electric vehicle, as the Luce — which was unveiled to the world earlier this week and promptly saw the company’s shares crash out in New York and Milan — gets subtly shaded by competitors online and not-so-subtly shaded by basically everyone else.

What makes all of this worse for Ferrari is that, even by the luxury car maker’s notoriously high standards, they’ve slapped a pretty hefty price tag on the Luce, and the company’s CEO, Benedetto Vigna, has already been forced to defend the €550,000 ($640,000) price point, saying yesterday that it’s “fair to pay for innovation,” per Reuters.

While Ferrari’s cars have been getting more expensive of late, as recently as 2022, Ferrari’s average revenue per car sold was around $340,000. At nearly twice that price, this new electric model is obviously proving a little much (visually, conceptually, and financially) for many loyal and long-standing fans of the Prancing Horse to stomach.