Reddit is Taking up to 20% of Some Brands’ Paid Social Budgets

Reddit's advertising business is no longer a sideshow. The platform posted ad revenue of $690 million in the fourth quarter of 2025, a 75% year-on-year increase, bringing total quarterly income to $726 million. Those numbers are hard to dismiss, and media buyers are not dismissing them.

According to Digiday, five media buyers confirmed the platform is now attracting between 5% and 20% of paid social budgets from some brands, including retailers and beverage advertisers. “In 2025 a lot of brands were open to unlocking that budget; in 2026 they're ramping up,” said Shatesha Scales, supervisor of paid social at Rain the Growth Agency. Kira Henson, director of paid social and search at Good Apple, told Digiday this year brought more new Reddit launches and campaign prep than she had seen before from clients.

That is a meaningful shift in perception for a platform that was, until recently, considered too difficult to sell internally. “Five years ago, none of our clients were using Reddit. It was the hardest sell. Brand safety was just not there,” said Rita Steinberg, vp of media at FUSE Create. Since Reddit's 2024 stock market debut, that calculation has changed for most buyers.

What Advertisers Are Actually Using It For

The honest picture from media buyers is more nuanced than the headline revenue growth suggests. Reddit is working well as an upper-funnel awareness channel, particularly for brands that want to reach specialist, interest-defined communities. The subreddit structure makes that targeting unusually precise. Method1, for example, is running campaigns across more than 100 different subreddits, using category and subreddit takeovers to drive what its director of media Ian Orekondy described as “share of search and share of market.”

JCPenney used Reddit's Spoiler Ads format during an autumn campaign between September and December, running with agency Dentsu X. The format hides the ad until a user clicks to reveal it, mimicking how Reddit's own spoiler feature works for content. Campaign tests showed a video completion rate 20% higher than regular in-feed placements. Jenna Palmer, group director of paid social at Dentsu X, told Digiday the reveal mechanic “really helped with surprise and intrigue.” JCPenney is running the format again in a spring push, with an increased Reddit budget.

Where it is not yet competing is at the bottom of the funnel. “From a conversions perspective, it doesn't kind of match where we see Meta and TikTok going,” said Taji Zaminasli, co-founder and managing partner at Ars X Machina. Ryan Schuster, director of paid search and social at Brainlabs, told Digiday he does not see exponential budget growth ahead, estimating a 5-10% increase over the next year rather than a step change.

That is not a criticism of Reddit so much as a description of where it fits. Deanna Mulkeen, head of media investment at Wpromote, put it plainly: “It is not just a paid social platform. It is the future of search [and] it is a rich social platform.”

Why This Matters For Affiliate Program Managers

For affiliate marketers, Reddit's trajectory is worth taking seriously for reasons that go beyond the ad revenue figures.

The platform is not new territory for performance marketers, but the way most have used it has been organic: community participation, reputation building inside subreddits, and the occasional promoted post. Reddit's growing ad tools, including direct campaign import from Meta and new ad formats, have lowered the barrier to running structured paid campaigns. The question for affiliate program managers is whether the brand awareness use case that retailers and consumer goods companies are buying into has a parallel application for affiliate acquisition and partner recruitment.

It does, and the subreddit structure is the reason. Communities organised around specific interests, professions, or niches contain concentrated audiences that are genuinely hard to find at that level of specificity on other platforms. For an affiliate program in a narrow vertical, the ability to target at subreddit level means reaching an audience pre-filtered by interest rather than demographic approximation.

The upper-funnel limitation that media buyers describe is real but it is also partly a measurement problem. Reddit conversations influence purchase decisions before a buyer shows any behavioural signal on Google or Meta. That influence is difficult to attribute in last-click models, which is likely part of why direct conversion numbers disappoint against Meta benchmarks. The broader attribution problem in affiliate marketing has made this kind of top-of-funnel influence harder to justify internally, but that does not mean the influence is absent.

The Brand Safety Question Is Settled, But The Culture Question Is Not

The brand safety barrier that kept most advertisers away from Reddit has largely cleared. What remains is the platform's culture, and that is actually more consequential than safety for affiliate marketers specifically.

Reddit communities have a well-established intolerance for content that reads as promotional without being useful. Organic presence on Reddit requires genuine contribution, not broadcasting. Paid formats buy visibility, but they do not buy credibility, and in communities where users vote content up or down based on perceived value, credibility matters more than on most other platforms.

Reddit's Community Intelligence platform, launched in 2025, offers a more practical entry point for brands and affiliates that are not ready to run paid campaigns. The tools surface genuine consumer discussions from Reddit's back catalog of posts and comments, giving marketers insight into how their category is actually being discussed before spending anything. For affiliate program managers trying to understand what their target audience values, that is more useful than another demographic report.

The B2B case for Reddit is also solidifying independently of the consumer brand spend story. Expert communities in technical and professional verticals have seen Reddit become a default research destination, particularly for buyers who distrust vendor-produced content and want peer-sourced input.

The Bigger Picture

Reddit's ad revenue growth is coming off a relatively small base, and the buyers cited in Digiday's reporting are careful not to oversell what they are seeing. Consistent measurement is what will determine whether budgets increase further, and the conversion benchmarks against Meta are not there yet.

But the structural argument for Reddit as a channel is not really about conversion rates on individual campaigns. It is about where trust-based conversations happen online, and where audiences actively seek recommendations rather than passively receive them. Google's integration of Reddit content into search results extended the platform's reach beyond its own walls. Reddit overtaking TikTok as the UK's fourth largest social platform confirmed that its audience growth is not limited to the US market.

For affiliate marketers building channel strategies for 2026, the question is not whether Reddit deserves attention. The revenue numbers and media buyer behaviour confirm that it does. The question is whether your program is approaching it in a way that the platform's communities will actually respond to. Brands that treat it as another paid social placement will get upper-funnel metrics at best. Those that invest in understanding specific subreddit cultures first, paid and organic working together, are the ones building the kind of presence that compounds over time.