Reddit made some big changes last year, with a redesign of its website and the launch of a native video feature optimized exclusively for the site’s new look. Now their risky move is paying off, as the company is reportedly getting an average of a billion video views a month. Reddit is now hoping the impressive number of views will get the platform on more marketers’ radars.
While the company allows creators to share videos from services like Youtube, the extraordinary milestone pertains solely to Reddit’s proprietary player, which now accounts for the majority of video views on the platform.
According to Reddit data, users have uploaded or posted a grand total of 996,000 native videos in September. The company also claims a 38 percent growth in native videos since January and that 20 percent of its 330 million active monthly users upload or watch videos regularly. There are also more than 400,000 hours of native hosted videos being served daily while 13 million hours of video are watched per month.
Advertisers should count this rise in video views as a positive thing, even though Reddit has not been actively monetizing their videos with in-stream ads yet. But Reddit has been dispersing their autoplay video ads in their subreddits and feeds.
Reddit’s ad revenue has tripled since 2015 and Christine Cassis, the company’s senior communications manager, confirmed on Reddit’s official blog that their video ads are now enjoying 2.3 times more conversions than static ads. Some campaigns have even garnered 3.5 times higher engagement levels. As a matter of fact, the view rates of Reddit’s video ads are on par with that of Facebook.
“Reddit Surpasses 1 Billion Video Views, Closes in on 1 Million Uploads Per Month” via @Variety: https://t.co/PupXE8ul7x
— Reddit (@reddit) October 3, 2018
The company’s beta video marketers have also noticed a significant boost in key metrics, like purchase intent and brand favorability. A recent Milward Brown study even indicated that Reddit’s videos are performing better than the industry’s average with regards to digital ads.
There’s so much potential for video ads on Reddit. Consider this – about 10,000 active communities on the platform are using native videos, and 20 percent of all users regularly watch or post videos. According to the company’s VP of Product, Alex Le, this increased usage of video has all been organic.
“We have seen over time more and more people incorporating videos into the way they are having conversation on Reddit,” Le said.
Despite its impressive performance, Reddit still has a long way to go. The company is still a text-heavy platform and to successfully integrate video on its threads requires a massive change in Redditors’ mentality. It also means the company has to step up and ensure that their video hosting system is better than other platforms.
[Featured image via Twitter]