Reddit doesn’t typically get lumped in with massive internet video platforms like Netflix and YouTube, but that will change if the website continues growing its video traffic.
About one year ago, Reddit launched native video hosting, and according to its 2018 year in review blog post, it’s already tracking 1.4 billion native video views per month. That’s a 40% increase over where the platform was at two months ago.
At this point, Reddit is serving 400,000 hours of natively hosted video every day and more than 13 million hours of video monthly, up 38% since the beginning of 2018.
“Not only is native video proving to be a growing medium for Content Creators on Reddit, the content also aligns with our audience and communities—which is crucial to the success of Reddit-hosted video and the authentic conversations surrounding them,” Reddit wrote.
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According to Reddit’s video report from October 2018, Reddit community users posted nearly 1 million videos to the site during August 2018, up 31% year over year. Reddit said that since launching hosted videos in August 2017, almost a quarter of videos posted to Reddit use the site’s native player, surpassing YouTube links.
Reddit attributed most of its video traffic growth to mobile platforms. In August 2018, the company said that nearly 70% of all video consumption on Reddit occurred on its Android and iOS apps and that over the previous year, video consumption on mobile doubled.
Reddit is translating this video traffic into advertising revenue by using audience targeting and guaranteed views. The company said video advertisements on its platform are seeing a 2.3x conversion rate over nonvideo ads.
“We’ve been partnering with Reddit over the past two years measuring campaign performance, and during that time Reddit’s average performance has outperformed our benchmarks for both awareness and lower-funnel metrics,” said James Jarzab, vice president at Kantar’s Insights division, in a statement. “From these initial campaign results their new video product is on the same track, and advertisers should take notice.”