Reddit CEO Steve Huffman announced during the recent earnings call that the social network plans to launch a brand new upgraded search tool in 2025, aimed at helping users navigate platform content more easily while answering some "subjective, complex, and interesting questions."
This new tool will integrate the Reddit Answers feature, allowing users to pose questions and receive concise summaries of relevant replies and topics.
Huffman stated that Reddit users have left a vast amount of discussion data over the past 20 years, which is the potential value that Reddit Answers aims to unlock. "We are starting to leverage this information," he said during the earnings call, "and we will continuously iterate and improve this product."
Additionally, Reddit's Chief Financial Officer Drew Vollero mentioned during the meeting that the company is recruiting engineers to form a small search team focused on developing this new feature. Reddit has been actively embracing artificial intelligence technologies to drive platform growth. Last year, Reddit launched AI-driven translation features in several new regions and plans to introduce more related services this year. Furthermore, Reddit has begun testing AI-driven search results pages that can summarize and recommend content from different communities.
However, Reddit's financial performance in the fourth quarter of 2024 disappointed investors, partly due to changes in Google's search algorithm affecting traffic. Although Reddit's daily active users grew by 39% year-on-year to 101.7 million, it still fell short of investor expectations of 103.1 million.
Huffman also hinted that in the future, the search function may be integrated into the user onboarding process on the platform to drive user growth, enhance retention, and ultimately increase revenue. He believes that "helping users search directly on Reddit, optimizing queries, and combining search with the onboarding process are all very interesting directions." Huffman noted that understanding user demand signals has tremendous monetization potential.
Key Points:
🔍 Reddit plans to launch a new search tool in 2025, integrating the AI-driven Reddit Answers feature.
👥 The company is hiring engineers to build a small team focused on the search functionality.
📈 Despite significant user growth, Reddit's financial performance did not meet investor expectations.
