Reddit and Hootsuite data says the platform has 330M MAUs in April, up 30% in the last six months from 250M in November 2017, on par with Twitter
Simon Kemp / The Next Web :
Context & Ripple Effects
Reddit's scale has been a running question because the company rarely discloses numbers itself. This Hootsuite/Simon Kemp figure of 330M MAUs — up 30% in six months from 250M in November 2017 — is the first third-party sizing that puts Reddit at Twitter parity, and it landed just before Reddit repeated the same 330M number in its own $300M Series D raise at a $3B valuation.
The catch, flagged in follow-up coverage, is monetization: roughly $0.30 in average revenue per user, far below every other major social network. So the story is a platform reaching Twitter-scale audiences while earning a fraction of Twitter-scale revenue per user.
First-order effects
- Advertisers evaluating social budgets can no longer treat Reddit as a niche forum — at 330M MAUs it competes for the same reach tier as Twitter, which had been the default 'second-tier' buy after Facebook.
- Reddit's own fundraising narrative gets external validation: the Series D deck's user claim now has independent corroboration, de-risking the $3B valuation for Tencent, Sequoia, a16z, and Fidelity.
Second-order effects
- The gap between audience scale and ~$0.30 ARPU puts pressure on Reddit to professionalize its ad product and sales organization, since investors priced the round on closing exactly that gap.
- Twitter faces a new comparison baseline: once Reddit is credibly 'on par,' Twitter's pitch shifts from unique scale to engagement quality and advertiser tooling.
Third-order effects
- If the growth pattern held — and it did, per Reddit's own later disclosures of 430M MAUs in its 2019 retrospective and first-time DAU reporting — Reddit graduates into the top tier of social platforms, where distribution dynamics like Google surfacing Reddit content start compounding its traffic independently of its app.
- A structurally under-monetized platform at Twitter scale becomes an acquisition-and-valuation argument: revenue per user is the lever, and whoever closes it re-rates the whole company.
The trend: Reddit is converting from an opaque, community-run forum into a measured, ad-supported major social platform whose scale rivals Twitter while its monetization lags far behind.