Reddit Captures 7% to 16% Less Audience Time During Blackout

The community website has alienated community leaders with new rules

The value of Reddit comes from community-generated content, and that is a problem now that the company has alienated important community leaders, the moderators of its forums.

The Reddit blackout, which began last Monday, is a sort of strike in which moderators have shut down the forums they manage on a volunteer basis in protest of the company’s imposition of new fees.

The fees for access to the Reddit application programming interfaces (API) – the web-based protocols programmers use to connect to the service – are likely to force popular third-party mobile apps to go out of business.

Key takeaways

• On June 13, the day after the blackout began, the amount of time visitors to the website spent browsing content dropped to 7 minutes, 16 seconds, or about 16% below the normal level of more than 8 minutes, 40 seconds. Since then, visit duration has recovered somewhat to a little over 8 minutes on Sunday, but that’s still a 7% drop from the average visit duration in May.
• The number of visits to the website was down 7% on June 13, compared with an average day earlier this year. Since then, as many subreddits have come back online (even if they are continuing to protest in other ways), traffic has recovered to more normal levels.
• Update: However, for the days since June 13 through June 21, average daily traffic to the ads.reddit.com ad-selling portal is down about 20%, suggesting that advertisers are paying attention to the community discontent.
• On a year-over-year basis, Reddit’s web traffic has been down almost every month since mid-2021. In May, it was down 8.7%.
• Usage of the official Reddit mobile apps was also down in May, by 8.7% year-over-year on Android and a little less on iOS.

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman continues to aggressively defend the policies at the center of this controversy, which among other things he says are necessary to get his company paid for its content by generative AI engines like ChatGPT. AI chatbots tend to undermine the value of community websites like Reddit and Stack Overflow, providing quick answers that many web users find eliminates the need to go searching through community forums for answers to their questions.

The question is whether the company can pivot to new revenue sources without undermining the community contributions that made Reddit what it is – and destroying the value that was supposed to allow Reddit to achieve a long-planned IPO.

As of Monday, many of the most popular subreddit forums that participated in the blackout were back online – although some were participating in another form of protest, cluttering their feeds with pictures of John Oliver as a way of making relevant content harder to find. Messages encouraging participants to switch to a Discord server for the same community interest were also pinned to the top of multiple forums.

For specific forums, the blackout came at the worst possible time — like the r/NBA one that went dark just when the pro basketball finals would normally have driven intense interest and traffic.

Web users are spending less time on Reddit

The important engagement metric of time spent on reddit.com dropped to seven minutes, 16 seconds (7:16) on June 13, the day after the moderators’ blackout began. For comparison, in May the daily visit duration ranged from 7:29 to 8:52 – averaging about 8:41.

That’s a clue that web visitors noticed the absence of some of their favorite content on the site.

Web traffic is also down (and not just because of the blackout)

The drop in the volume of visits to the Reddit website in recent days was noticeable, although not extreme.

More worrying for Reddit is the long-term trend. The chart below shows the year-over-year change in total desktop and mobile web visits.

Usage of the official Reddit mobile apps has also been on the decline, with monthly active users of the Android app down 9.2% year-over-year in May.

Making a community-based website profitable is challenging

This Batman fandom subreddit is one that remained offline on Monday.

Making a community website profitable based on advertising alone is not easy, which is why companies like Reddit exploring other sources of revenue, including API fees. Reddit cannot survive and thrive without a path to profitability. But it can’t survive without the support of its community, either, and community members spending less time on the service is a warning sign.

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