Traffic, Engagement & Demographics: An Advertiser’s Guide to Reddit

Reddit, with its iconic orange color scheme and democratized algorithm, is the fourth most-visited website of 2026 (so far). Made up of thousands of individual forums, or “subreddits”, in some ways Reddit is a call-back to the earliest days of the internet, where anonymous users gathered in chatrooms to discuss niche interests. But even more than two decades on since its 2005 debut, Reddit remains a highly relevant platform for communities to congregate in — and increasingly, a hot spot for advertisers trying to target specialized, high-intent audiences.

The top ten subreddits by web visits (Jan 1 - June 30, 2026) make up 2% of the site’s overall traffic. The most-visited, r/NBA, has garnered 65.9M hits in 2026. By contrast, the official NBA.com site received 113M visits over the same period. Put differently, the official NBA website didn’t even double the traffic going to a fan-run community. Similar trends can be seen elsewhere. The 10th most-visited subreddit, r/LeagueofLegends, received 21.9M visits from January to June — a full 87% of the traffic funneled to the game’s homepage, LeagueofLegends.com, which pulled in 25M visits. Where else on the internet can you find unofficial discussion forums that rival the traffic of top brand destinations?

Reddit’s US audience splits across two surfaces: web and app. Our demographic data pertains to app users — those committed enough to using the platform that they took the extra step to download Reddit. This audience is predominantly male (64%) but the size of the gender disparity changes when looking at different age brackets. The group that comes closest to gender parity is those aged 55 and older, where men only lead women by 1.1 percentage points. Meanwhile, the largest disparity is among users 25-34 years old; here, women trail male users by over 12 ppts. This is also the largest group, making up nearly half (45%) of Reddit’s entire app audience. All in all, people under 45 make up 89% of users — so while it may not be the ideal venue in which to target mature consumers, younger audiences are a sure bet. 

To add some color to this analysis, let’s look at the personas most predisposed towards using Reddit’s mobile app. LGBTQ Daters are 2.07 times more likely than the general population to use Reddit. Other groups that overindex include PC Gamers (1.83x), Fine Diners (1.83x), Digital Daters (1.81x), Fast Foodies (1.79x) and Moviegoers (1.76x). 

Click here for more info on how we define all these personas.

Most importantly, however, these users are engaged. Reddit’s 14-day retention rate as of June 2026 is 33% — higher than both X’s (32%) and TikTok’s (29%). Reddit users in the United States average an hour and fifty minutes per week using the app, split into 45 weekly sessions that last about two minutes and 42 seconds each. On the web, they spend even longer. Redditors average 31 minutes a day on desktop web, which adds up to over 3.5 hours a week using the site. For context, this is only slightly below Instagram, whose desktop web users average 33 minutes a day. For traditional news sites like CNN, users average only 9 minutes. 

Armed with more context on who this audience is, let’s get into where advertisers are reaching them. Of all the impressions served to Reddit app users, 29% of them are seen on Instagram. Reddit itself comes in second place, claiming 18% of impressions, followed by YouTube (15%) and Facebook (14%). Temu is the most common advertiser that Redditors are exposed to, with 63% of Reddit app users having been shown at least one ad for the brand this year. The average number of Temu ads this group has seen since the start of 2026 is 14. Similar exposure can be seen for Disney+ (60% of the audience has seen an ad), Peacock (53%), TikTok (52%) and Taco Bell (51%). 

Keep in mind that these are just the ads Redditors see — on any social platform. Take a look at the below chart to get a feel for the ad categories Reddit users are exposed to, compared to the ads actually running on Reddit:

As you can see, Health & Wellness advertisers (yellow bars) are overrepresented on the site itself, as are the Financial Services and Software categories. The single-most-prominent advertiser on Reddit is pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, and their highest-budget ads on the platform are for GLP-1s. 

The mismatch itself is the opportunity: the categories whose ads Redditors see most (Shopping, Media & Entertainment, CPG) are reaching this audience constantly, but largely on other platforms. On Reddit itself, where the audience is highly engaged, those same categories are comparatively scarce. Additionally, ad spend on Reddit is down 5% year-to-date, even as impressions have risen 20%. In other words, attention on Reddit is rising while the competition for it is thinning. For advertisers looking to target highly-specialized, interest-driven audiences, the door is still wide open.