Reddit is building a video experience that lets people watch its most popular posts, or just listen to them in the background. CEO Steve Huffman told investors on the company's second-quarter earnings call on 30 July that something should be ready for testing later this year.

The inspiration is TikTok, where text-to-speech readings of Reddit threads run over unrelated gameplay or cooking footage, a format Huffman described as podcasts of people reading Reddit.

TikTok carries 19.6 million posts tagged #reddit and another 9.9 million tagged #redditstories, which means the format was invented by other people, on someone else's app, using Reddit's content for free.

Reddit has been moving this way for a while: video in comments launched in June and already makes up more than 10% of video posts. The financial backdrop explains the urgency. Revenue topped $800m for an eighth straight quarter of growth above 60%, global daily uniques hit 130.3 million, but US daily users slipped sequentially, and the stock fell around 11% after Huffman called search referrals choppy.

TechCrunch reported the plan and placed it inside a wider wave of apps bolting vertical feeds onto everything. CNBC notes investors are worried about the Google dependency, while The Motley Fool transcript shows Reddit will stop reporting its logged-in and logged-out user split from Q3.

Reddit's problem is that its best distribution has always belonged to someone else. Google sends the visitors and is now sending fewer. TikTok turned Reddit threads into an entire content genre and kept every second of the watch time. Building the feed in-house is the obvious defensive move, but the thing that makes those clips work is the raw, anonymous mess of the original comment section, not the production values, and platforms are historically bad at recreating that on purpose.

The read for operators here is narrower: Reddit is now optimising for app habit over search arrivals, so any strategy that depends on ranking a Reddit thread for your category gets less reliable from this point on.

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