Reddit launches a video division to create original content
The social news service Reddit has grown to a truly massive size, garnering 170 million monthly visitors and 6.7 billion pages view this January, while maintaining a fairly bare-bones service. It helps elevate obscure material …
Context & Ripple Effects
In 2015 Reddit is a text-and-link service with scale but no owned media engine: 170 million monthly visitors and 6.7 billion pageviews in January, with video consumption happening off-platform or via embeds. A dedicated video division is its first move to turn that attention into original programming.
The division is the seed of a decade-long build-out that later coverage traces step by step: video ads and a rebuilt self-service ad platform in 2017, native user uploads that August, a native player crossing 1 billion monthly views within a year, and eventually the acquisition of TikTok rival Dubsmash — making this launch the origin point of Reddit's video business rather than a one-off experiment.
First-order effects
- Reddit gains an internal studio whose output feeds its own pages, converting some of the community-surfaced material it already elevates into content it controls and can monetize.
Second-order effects
- Advertisers and the media agencies Reddit partners with get an original-video inventory to buy against, giving the ad platform a premium tier beyond user-generated clips.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, community platforms stop renting their audiences to external video hosts and build owned pipelines instead — the trajectory the later native player and Dubsmash acquisition confirm.
The trend: Community platforms are vertically integrating into video production, distribution, and monetization, turning aggregated audience attention into owned media inventory.