How Reddit built its sales engine

Reddit’s largely text-based approach has always moved against the grain. Today the platform, founded in 2005, boasts approximately 443 million weekly active users and 100,000 active communities (or subreddits).

During the post-Covid era, its valuation rocketed to around $10 billion amid increased user engagement (it’s over three times higher today). Now public after a 2024 IPO, Reddit has become an essential part of the advertising ecosystem for some of the world’s biggest companies. In Q3, ad sales were up 74% YoY to $549 million.

In this edition of Your Rev Org, Revenue Brew spoke with some of the key players inside Reddit’s sales engine to discuss how the team was reconfigured to create a multifaceted ad sales powerhouse.

Recipe: crafting the right sales team

For Reddit’s global head of strategic partnerships, Paul Peterman (formerly senior managing director of large customer sales), the positioning of the platform for advertisers was a legitimate curiosity.

“Everyone had heard of Reddit—[it] had been around for a long time—but I think a lot of our advertisers weren’t clear on the unique outcomes that we could drive for their business, or exactly where we fit into their media mix,” Peterman said.

Peterman and other leaders at Reddit built their sales approach with two ideas in mind: crafting an effective sales narrative and leading with product.

This included bringing product teams closer to sales pitches, a new tactic for Reddit, and creating an infrastructure for displaying what creative advertising looks like on the platform.

“While our sales teams are at the front line of this, it allowed us to articulate the needs of different segments of advertisers back to our product teams in a way that we really hadn’t done before,” Peterman said. 

Once this was executed, Peterman said advertisers started to prefer Reddit because of the unique opportunities it could drive.

“We’re making strides with continuing to enhance our opportunities for advertisers to advertise across all of their objectives, and we’re seeing more advertisers really seeing Reddit as a full-funnel platform, which is really fun,” Peterman said.

Catching big fish

Capturing customers from each market segment meant tweaking the composition of the sales team. When it comes to large customer sales, for example, it’s hard to find someone who knows more than Paulita David, senior managing director for large customer sales.

Initially brought on to help “verticalize” Reddit’s operations after running the sales and media gauntlet at Google, she set out to create a sales team that intimately understood not only the Reddit platform but the needs of large customers.

“When we think about how we build the sales team, we really focus on building solutions aligned with large advertiser needs,” David told Revenue Brew.

This resulted in the construction of a team made up of sellers from agencies and other platforms, who “truly understand how large customers engage with their customers” and how they bring in revenue.

David said Reddit’s outbound strategy was effectively outshined by inbound demand.

“It used to be, we would go and meet with folks and be like, ‘We’re Reddit. This is what we’re all about. Let us show you the platform.’” David said. “Now, we’re getting a lot more people coming to us and saying, ‘How do we show up on the platform? We know we need to be on Reddit.’”

Building teams for all buyers

Building the right ad sales infrastructure meant building teams for all segments, and that is exactly what Reddit did. Stephen Riad, EVP global ad sales, said he built out his team centered around three unique sales channels: partnerships, SMBs, and mid-market. Riad also emphasized Reddit’s network of contractors who are able to capture customers in various important geographies and languages.

“We need really talented folks that speak German and Portuguese and French and Spanish and Italian, and so we bring that all together here in Europe under one hub, one SMB hub, with all the language capabilities that we need to go to market,” Riad said.

Riad says SMBs are successful on Reddit because they can target audiences based on specific interests and passions.

“The beauty about Reddit is there’s an interest, topic, community on everything, and so if you’re a business selling running shoes in Portugal, and you want to target the Portuguese communities, there are running communities, fitness clubs, a whole bunch of things on Reddit,” Riad said.

Infrastructure for imagination

Monetizing Reddit’s community magic was no small project. That’s where Andy Schneider, EVP of advertising sales, and Reddit’s in-house creative strategy team KarmaLab came in.

“So much of Reddit’s unique position is how human the platform is, and KarmaLab really brings that to life in tandem with our advertising partners,” Schneider said.

KarmaLab (named after Reddit’s point-based credit system) was created to sit alongside the platform’s scaling global ads business. Positioning itself as a full-service agency, it helps companies navigate the community ecosystem and execute large advertising pushes—or even smaller actions like contributing to community conversations with a well-timed meme.

“It’s important to be bringing these conversations and these trends and these cultural nuances to advertisers because it just adds to the level of intentionality in their advertising,” Schneider said.

With intentionality in mind, Reddit was able to mimic the success of its developer platform—which allows developers to create and embed games and apps into the Reddit ecosystem—for advertisers.

“We saw that Redditors on the consumer side were leveraging our developer platform to create bespoke code experiences in feed, and we thought, ‘Let’s bring this to advertisers,’” Schneider said. “I always think that the best advertising experiences come from great consumer experiences.”

Expert insight: monetizing social media

Brent Csutoras is founder and CEO of marketing firm OGS media and expert on all things Reddit. He thinks its success growing its ad sales division stems from servicing each psychological step of the customer journey.

“You have hundreds of thousands of people on every single topic, and the avid fans tend to be the better experts,” Csutoras said.

He says people in search of something want to do some research and share responsibility with others, and that the platform has created an environment where all of this can take place.

“People need that depth of conversation and Reddit provides that,” Csutoras said.

The ability for brands to be present in these conversations is what Csutoras calls “the moment,” or the intersection between a customer need and a proposed solution. Csutoras suggests there is a fly-on-the-wall quality to the Reddit ecosystem that is unique.

“Where can you find [this] depth of conversation, where people are really engaged, where you can start to learn what they really think about these products?” he said.

Despite what Reddit has achieved, Csutoras warned there is a delicate balance the company should always be conscious of.

“That’s the thing about communities, and that’s the thing about this whole space, is that you never can get too comfortable. You never can stop evolving. But one thing that Steve [Huffman, co-founder and CEO] has always done…is he has been on the forefront of setting internet culture for a long time,” Csutoras said.