Reddit’s Role in the New Discovery Landscape: What Marketers Need to Know 

The way consumers discover products, compare options, and make purchasing decisions looks nothing like it did even two years ago. Search queries that once ended on a results page now bounce between Google, AI-powered answer engines, and community platforms where real people share firsthand experiences. 

Reddit sits at the center of that shift. The platform is the number-one most-cited domain across all major AI and LLM platforms, and with over 100,000 active communities and 121 million daily active unique users, it has become one of the most influential environments shaping how people evaluate and decide.

The advertising opportunity is catching up to the audience. Reddit’s ad business has been one of the fastest-growing in digital media, with eMarketer projecting global ad revenues to nearly 5x between 2023 and 2027 (from $0.71 billion to $3.42 billion). But the more interesting signal is how that growth is happening: monetization per hour spent on the platform is climbing steadily, meaning Reddit is getting better at turning attention into ad value without flooding the experience with more ads. That’s a healthier growth curve than most platforms can claim.

Skai recently partnered with Reddit Ads to bring the platform into our omnichannel advertising workflow, giving advertisers unified planning, execution, and measurement alongside their other media investments. But the bigger story is what’s driving this integration.

To understand what this shift means for advertisers, we sat down with someone who has spent decades on both sides of the media buy.

Five questions with Reddit’s VP of Global Agency & Partnerships

Sharb Farjami is VP of Global Agency & Partnerships at Reddit, where he leads the platform’s relationships with agency holding companies and their clients worldwide. He’s spent nearly 30 years moving between agency and media leadership, including CEO of Wavemaker North America (WPP), COO of Mindshare, and senior roles at News Corp, Foxtel, and Viacom, before joining Reddit in late 2025. As he told us, “I’ve worked media side, then agency, then media, then agency. Coming to a platform is not the same as just going to a media company. That’s one unique difference.”

That cross-pollinated career, spanning ad sales, agency operations, content commercialization, and now platform partnerships, means Sharb understands what it takes for a publisher to earn its way into an enterprise media plan. He also still carries the agency lens. “Agencies are fascinating places,” he said. “You get exposure to so many different sides of the dice.”

We asked him about where discovery is heading, why trust matters more than ever, and what Reddit’s rise means for performance marketers.

The consumer search journey has been completely disrupted. How does Reddit fit into the way people discover brands and products today?

The whole consumer search journey has changed. Historically, you might ask friends, go to a search engine, or maybe get influenced by an influencer. Now? You might go to Google, which sends you to Reddit, which sends you back to Google, which sends you back to Reddit. What you’re getting in that loop is lived experience. Real conversations from real people about things they’ve actually done, felt, or seen.

Think about it this way: if you want to buy a Toyota, you don’t want the brochure. You want to hear from someone who’s been driving that Toyota. You want trusted, first-hand experience.

For me personally, my youngest is going through the college application process right now, and Reddit has been an incredible source of information for navigating that journey. You’re getting perspectives from people who have actually been through it. That’s the kind of high-intent discovery that’s happening across the platform every day.

Reddit is an inherently high-intent platform. When you consider the signals people give off in these communities, they’re powerful. And the anonymity that’s built into Reddit means people tend to be very honest. They’re talking about things they’re genuinely interested in or have a real perspective on. We have over 100,000 active communities. Think about that: 100,000 different interest groups where people are talking about stuff they actually care about. The depth is remarkable.

In a world filling with AI-generated content, what makes Reddit content trusted?

Reddit is the most human place on the internet.

What makes Reddit different comes down to a few things. First, the content is organized by interest. It’s the only platform where that’s the structural foundation. I’m a runner, and when I go to running subreddits, I’m surrounded by people who actually run. You feel like it’s your place. There’s a resonance there that algorithm-driven feeds can’t replicate.

Second, the mods [moderators]. They are unbelievably dedicated and passionate. If you look at the rules across communities, they essentially boil down to: be a good person, be human. Moderators keep conversations authentic. If someone tries to spam or hijack a conversation to promote something, it gets flagged and removed fast.

Third, the upvote and downvote system. The community will surface what’s valuable and bury what isn’t. If what you share is useful, it rises. If it’s not, it won’t.

It’s authentic, it’s trusted, it’s human. The conversations are fundamentally different from what you find anywhere else online.

Reddit is one of the most-cited domains across major AI and LLM platforms. How does AI change the value of conversations for brands?

AI loves human conversations. It needs nuance, depth, and texture. It needs more than black-and-white factual data. Conversations are incredibly good at training AI for that kind of nuance.

Reddit has 21 years of human conversation. It’s the largest corpus of human conversation in the world. By some estimates, the platform generates the equivalent of Wikipedia’s total word count every few weeks. And AI loves words. It loves to train on words. So the depth and the breadth of what’s being discussed is enormously valuable.

Think about the range: food, movies, sports, cosmetics, health concerns, from eczema to headaches. Many of those discussions are decision-making discussions. A significant share of all online conversations about purchasing happen on Reddit.

So AI doesn’t diminish the value of these conversations. It intensifies the need for unique human perspective. That’s what Reddit is, by definition. As AI gets better at aggregating and synthesizing human conversation, the source material becomes more important, not less.

If you could correct one misconception marketers have about Reddit Ads, what would it be?

[Laughs] That advertisers don’t need to be on Reddit.

We’re a full-funnel platform. We help advertisers connect all the dots across the entire purchase journey. Our ad products have improved dramatically over recent years, and we continue to invest in them. We’re the sixth most-visited website in the world.

So the misconception is that Reddit is only good for upper-funnel awareness. That’s not the case. You can reach people at the top, in the middle, and at the very bottom. Marketers tend to want to slot publishers into one part of the journey. Reddit doesn’t fit neatly into a single slot because it operates across the full customer journey.

Last year, we grew mid-funnel volume by 60%. Conversions nearly doubled year over year. Our machine learning models for shopping have delivered growing efficiency improvements, and the number of lower-funnel ad conversions continues to grow. The product is real, and it’s scaling fast.

What role do third-party platforms like Skai play in Reddit’s advertising growth story?

I think about it as creating as many conditions for “yes” as possible. When I say conditions, I mean: what are the reasons an advertiser can say yes to coming and working with us? And one of the biggest is enabling them through their third-party partner.

When an omnichannel platform like Skai enables access to Reddit, it makes it easier for advertisers to bring us into their media plan. They get the things third-party platforms are built for: cross-channel planning, optimization tools, unified reporting, analytics. All the things that allow advertisers to manage Reddit alongside their other investments, not as a standalone experiment.

What we’ve seen across the industry is that when a client moves to a third-party platform, spend tends to accelerate. Advertisers who may have been stable in their spend for years suddenly see acceleration because they’re finally getting the performance visibility, the insights, or the optimization they needed.

So it’s more than just access. Third-party partnerships bring something additional. They give us exposure to marketers in different stages of their journey, using different buying models, for different reasons. And that’s what a good partnership should do.

Conclusion: There’s a big shift happening right now

Discovery has shifted and it’s not shifting back. Consumers are finding answers through an evolving mix of search engines, AI-powered experiences, and trusted community platforms where real people share real perspectives. For advertisers, the only question is how: How quickly can they build it into their media strategy?

What came through clearly in our conversation with Sharb is that these forces are converging, not competing. The same human conversations that make Reddit trusted are the ones training the AI models reshaping how people find products and make decisions. The platform is full-funnel, it’s high-intent, and the advertising infrastructure is scaling fast. And as Sharb put it, the goal is to create as many conditions for “yes” as possible, making it easier for brands to say yes to Reddit as a core part of how they reach consumers.

Learn more about the Skai + Reddit Ads partnership →

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