Publishers refine Reddit strategies to tap into targeted referral traffic

In 2023, referral traffic from Reddit brought in about 200,000 pageviews a month to Newsweek’s site, when just one person from its social team was posting on the platform. This year, Reddit is driving between 2 to 4 million pageviews, according to Grace MacRe, Newsweek’s deputy head of social media. Reddit drove 36 million pageviews to Newsweek this year so far, she said. More than 20% of Newsweek’s traffic comes from Reddit some months. There are now three Newsweek staffers posting on Reddit.

Reach, which owns U.K. and U.S. news sites like Mirror, Express, Daily Record and Daily Star, has restructured its social team to have its staff spend about 30-40% more time on Reddit, said Donna Ogier, the publisher’s director of US audience. Topics that do well include issues around injustice, fairness and transparency, ranging from Trump policies to the Diddy trial, she said. 

Reach is posting on about a dozen subreddits, roughly half a dozen times a day. The social team uses the platform to share its news coverage, add additional context to a story and give a space for its journalists to give readers additional detail, Ogier said.

“It’s not a volume play,” she said. “The success we find on Reddit is through very careful and intentional story placement… It’s the opposite of spray-and-pray.”

For now, publishers aren’t making money from the engagement they’re seeing on Reddit. It’s entirely a platform for developing a relationship with audiences, and encouraging them to clickthrough to their sites.

But for publishers, building a presence on Reddit is still a hands-on process. Ogier described posting on Reddit as “the equivalent to tweezers. It’s a very fine-tipped endeavor.”

Distribution strategies on other social platforms – like Facebook and X – are typically a matter of sharing the best and most recent stories to a large following. But Reddit is made up of thousands of smaller communities – broken up into “subreddits” – often with active and passionate participants and watchful moderators, often with their own community rules. 

The success of a Reddit strategy boils down to creating good relationships with subreddit communities and their moderators by participating in conversations, rather than just posting links to stories.

Reddit still doesn’t have a formal publisher program, but it has a team devoted to working with publishers, led by Gabriel Sands. But because his team doesn’t share specific strategies to help boost content visibility, it’s up to publishers to figure out how to navigate the delicate environment – mostly through trial and error, according to Sarakshi Rai, The Hill’s director of audience development and head of social media.

Tactics that work: no specific story quotas  

There are some unspoken but essential rules about posting on Reddit that publishers’ audience development teams have figured out, and abide by.

For example, Bhumika Tharoor, The Atlantic’s head of audience and programming, and Evan McMurry, who leads audience and Reddit strategies, said their team doesn’t have a specific quota for the number of times they post on Reddit each day. That’s because more than a handful of posts a day can get “spammy,” McMurry said.

“You can’t put too many posts in the same subreddit,” he said. “So long as we respect the rules of the road, we are welcome in those spaces.” 

The Atlantic’s tactic is usually to post a link to their story, with a long blurb (submitted and then vetted by a subreddit moderator) written by an Atlantic editor. These posts often have tens of thousands of interactions, such as votes and comments.

The Hill, meanwhile, makes sure not to double-up. 

“Other Reddit users are very quick to share The Hill’s stories on the platform so when we do share, we want to make sure it’s something that hasn’t been shared before and something the community engages with,” Rai said. “We primarily want to ensure we’re not duplicating content on different sub-Reddits as moderators of those communities prefer that approach.”

Newsweek is also seeing more Reddit referral traffic from its breaking news as subreddits are increasingly becoming places where users are interacting with breaking news stories, MacRe said. Before Newsweek posts in subreddits, its social team reaches out to moderators to build relationships with them. Newsweek regularly posts about 10 subreddits, about 10 times a day, she added.

Reddit audiences ‘not on other platforms’

The Atlantic has had an “aggressive” Reddit strategy for about a year and a half – but the platform didn’t become a top social referrer until last fall, McMurry said. The Atlantic is part of over 200 subreddits. The sizes of those spaces range – some of them, like r/politics, have over 8 million members, while others like r/EarthScience have about 25,000. It’s an audience that isn’t on other platforms, McMurry said. 

“Other social platforms have an algorithmic game that gets in the way and maybe even erodes the direct relationship with the people on the platform. [On]Reddit just being human in the way that the moderators think about how they’re moderating the platform feels really important to us,” Tharoor said. “The Reddit communities across different subreddits are people who are curious about a lot of things – that want to go deep on certain things, which is not very different from what we know about our Atlantic audience.”

Recently, the publisher has started getting into more granular subreddits and communities on the platform – like local subreddits for political coverage and specific technology-focused groups, McMurry said. They don’t post in those smaller, more targeted communities every day, but sometimes can see just as much engagement in those spaces as the larger subreddits, he added. 

Reddit “gives us access to niche communities where a story might not resonate with a mainstream social audience. We can really tap into these smaller communities,” Newsweek’s MacRe said. Her team often posts in U.S. state-focused subreddits, for example.

The Atlantic also started hosting Ask Me Anythings (where Reddit users in specific subreddits can ask its writers and reporters questions live) every month, after publishers were given the ability to host AMAs themselves through a self-serve platform last year.

McMurry said The Atlantic plans to host AMAs more regularly this year, and he’s hoping video AMAs will soon be available to bring more of “a face and a personality” to those experiences. Reddit declined to share if this was a feature they were currently developing. 

Reddit released a report on Wednesday that showed when brands participate in organic conversation on Reddit, they receive more organic mentions. Just one organic post per week is associated with a 3.5% increase in positive posts from Reddit users about that brand, according to the report.

An increase of one positive post per week from Reddit users is associated with a 1% increase in attributed site traffic for that week, with further gains in subsequent weeks, according to the report, which was based on Reddit’s internal data.