Reddit announced on October 29, 2026, alongside third-quarter results showing revenue up 53% year-over-year to $895 million, that it will shift the platform to a primarily logged-in experience, with full testing of a logged-in-only version set to begin in select markets outside the United States in the fourth quarter of 2026.
Co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman detailed the change in a post on Reddit titled “About that login screen,” published ahead of the company’s quarterly earnings call, and the company laid out the strategy in its Q3 2026 shareholder letter, released with its third-quarter 2026 results. The earnings release states that Reddit uses Huffman’s user account on the platform, along with its investor relations website and designated subreddits, as channels for disclosing material information.
Huffman wrote that Reddit has allowed logged-out access to nearly all of the platform for the last two decades and said he had concluded the change is the right decision for the platform and the business. The shareholder letter describes the shift as a key piece of work to retain new audiences and states that the results of the fourth-quarter tests will inform an optimized version of logged-in-only Reddit globally. Huffman said the company will examine the impact on the user experience, the business, and the broader Reddit ecosystem before determining where the final boundaries sit. The letter also notes that pretty much all of the major ad-based platforms have gone through this transition.
Why Reddit Says It Is Making the Change
Huffman said the shift is better for user experience, better for the ads business, more in line with safety regulations, and more protective of Reddit’s data. On personalization, he said Reddit used to be the same product for everybody, but the platform is now so large that without personalization it is not relevant. He said logging in lets Reddit surface the content and communities most relevant to each user, and that core functions such as joining communities, voting, and commenting require an account.
Huffman also framed the move as a data-protection measure, writing that “the vast majority of unauthorized access to Reddit (basically the scraping and stealing of Reddit’s data) happens through our logged-out experiences.” He said Reddit will continue licensing its corpus intentionally, and that those commercial deals carry guardrails giving Reddit the right to control what the data can and cannot be used for and how it is presented. He added that more logged-in users allow Reddit to deliver more relevant ads, and that the change will make it easier to adapt to emerging regulations around the world.
The shareholder letter gives a parallel rationale, stating that moving to primarily logged-in will give Reddit more signals for ads targeting, that being logged in leads to higher engagement generally, and that the shift protects access to what the company describes as an extremely valuable corpus of data.
Search Referral Decline and User Metrics
The shareholder letter reports that Reddit’s search referral traffic was down meaningfully in the third quarter, with the decline accelerating later in the quarter. The biggest impact was on logged-out and web traffic, though the letter says some of the impact flows through to logged-in and app traffic because search referral is a common source of reengagement for users. The letter characterizes the backdrop as web search evolving from a gateway to the web into an AI-powered destination itself.
According to the letter, the declines continued into the early part of the fourth quarter, and during October 2026 search traffic dropped by more than 1 million referrals on average per week. The letter states that if that rate of decline continues, current trends suggest total daily active uniques could fall in the fourth quarter by a low-double-digit percentage from the company’s current base of 130 million.
For the third quarter, Reddit reported global daily active uniques (DAUq) of 130.3 million, up 12% year-over-year. U.S. DAUq was 50.7 million, down 2% year-over-year, while international DAUq grew 24% to 79.6 million, and weekly active uniques rose 16% to 515.2 million. The letter’s quarterly table shows U.S. DAUq at 53.2 million in the second quarter of 2026. Global logged-in DAUq was 53.5 million, up 7%, and logged-out DAUq was 76.8 million, up 17%. The letter states that logged-in and app DAUq together account for the vast majority of engagement and over 80% of monetization on Reddit, and that both grew quarter-over-quarter in the U.S. and the rest of the world.
The letter places the logged-in shift inside a broader retention strategy, reporting that the share of new users who return in the first week after installing the Reddit app is up double digits quarter-over-quarter and over 50% year-over-year, and that only about 13% of eligible mobile web users currently see the company’s app conversion prompt. The letter also states that Reddit added another billion posts and comments to its corpus during the quarter and that the community ecosystem reached over 27 billion posts and comments.
Privacy Mechanics and Open Questions
Huffman said logging in will not require a user’s name or identity, writing: “We don’t need your name. We don’t need to know who you are. We don’t need to know your identity.” He said Reddit does not require that information and will not with this change, and neither does its ads business.
He also said Reddit has rebuilt and is re-releasing an incognito mode in its app, describing it as read-only and saying users can browse and search without affecting their logged-in account. Logged-in users will be able to opt out of personalization, though Huffman said the product will not work as well without it.
Huffman acknowledged that questions remain about where the boundaries should sit between logged-in and logged-out experiences. He said logged-out access to the front page is useful and important, and that Reddit wants people to be able to share posts and wants visitors arriving from search or other external
Third-Quarter Results and Outlook
Third-quarter revenue of $895 million included advertising revenue of $847 million, up 54% year-over-year, and other revenue of $48 million, up 35%. Net income was $283 million, diluted earnings per share were $1.40, gross margin was 91.5%, and adjusted EBITDA was $402 million. Huffman said the results pushed Reddit past $3 billion in revenue over the last 12 months.
Reddit repurchased approximately 670,000 shares of its Class A common stock during the quarter for $100 million at an average price of $149.81 per share, and the company was added to the S&P 500 index earlier in the quarter. For the fourth quarter of 2026, Reddit estimated revenue in the range of $1,000 million to $1,030 million and adjusted EBITDA of $480 million to $510 million. The company scheduled its earnings call for October 29, 2026, at 1:30 p.m. PT, with questions solicited from the community in its investor relations subreddit and responses to be posted following the call.
