- More than 43% of Reddit’s customers are millennials — the platform’s most dominant technology.
- Maybe Reddit is well-liked as a result of it is text-based, and that is what millennials grew up with.
Reddit is the social platform most saturated by millennials, in keeping with an Emarketer report on US digital habits by technology.
Of logged-in customers on Reddit, 43.3% are millennials, in comparison with 29.6% who’re Gen Z. (Compare this to Snapchat, the place a whopping 52.3% of customers are Gen Z, however solely 32.9% are millennials.)
So why is Reddit such a millennial haven? I’ve a number of theories.
Reddit’s text-based discussion board model feels acquainted to millennials — we grew up with this type of format, and we’re used to it. Gen Z would possibly spend extra total minutes per day on digital platforms, however they vastly want visible and video codecs like YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat. Millennials nonetheless prefer to learn and kind.
Millennials are additionally at a degree of their lives when the kind of content material that thrives on Reddit might be an enormous draw: Things like house enchancment, gardening, lawncare, parenting, private finance, funding recommendation — these are issues that individuals of their 30s and 40s begin wanting to speak about, and people are all enormous subjects on Reddit.
At some level, there comes a day if you cease being cool and begin desirous to study woodworking. Time comes for us all.
It’s vital to notice: The report from Emarketer, which is a sister firm to BI, would not say that greater than 40% of millennials use Reddit — simply that of the individuals who do recurrently use Reddit, 43.3% are millennials.
Zooming out, amongst all millennials, solely 35.6% are common Reddit customers, making the platform a lot much less well-liked than YouTube, as an illustration, which the Emarketer report says is utilized by greater than 82% of millennials, and Facebook, which is utilized by 78.7%. The report is predicated on Emarketer’s forecasts from earlier this yr.
Reddit’s site visitors has grown considerably lately. In the second quarter of this yr, it reported 51% progress in day by day energetic customers in comparison with the identical interval final yr — far outpacing different social platforms.
Lots of that new site visitors is coming from Google search outcomes. Some individuals have even began to sort “reddit” on the finish of their search queries to attempt to discover higher outcomes.
And when you have a look at a few of the hottest subreddits, a few of them really feel very, uh, Peak Millenial. Aside from the primary ones like r/humorous, r/inquireReddit, and so forth., there are issues that really feel like relics from one other time in millennial-based web tradition: r/AnimalsBeingDerps, r/rarepuppers, r/reactiongifs.
Maybe Reddit is a protected house for millennials to be cringe and free.