Reddit’s Mike Romoff on AI Discovery, Community & the Future of Advertising

We are here in Las Vegas at CES, and today we are thrilled to welcome Mike Romoff, the Chief Revenue Officer of Reddit. With a resume boasting years of hard work leading teams at LinkedIn and Google, under Mike's leadership, Reddit is scaling globally, investing in AI and machine learning, and introducing innovative features like Reddit Answers and Reddit Pro to enhance user and advertiser experiences. Mike, so great to see you today.

Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

So Reddit has had a great year. Um, it's a company that has had so many like peaks and valleys over time, and it's really established itself as a real leader in community. Um, one thing I see with the consumer right now is that social media used to be the place where people went to build community, and so many social media platforms now have so much clickbait. They, they have a lot of content for more traditional media or creators, but there's not really a deep community. And I think there was a void in the marketplace that Reddit filled and continues to fill. Is that what you guys are saying as well?

Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head. I mean, Reddit is certainly having a cultural moment and I think Reddit's been doing its thing for a long time, right? Being a place for community, right? We like to say that everyone has a home on Reddit. Doing that for almost 20 years. Like, it's crazy how long the company has been, you know, creating community, driving authentic conversation. But I think you're right, we're in a cultural moment where people are craving a place, right? They're craving that community. They want some authenticity, right? They don't wanna get an answer from a made-for-advertising, you know, page from a search result. And so I think you're seeing people come to Reddit wherever they start. It could be on a search, it could be that they're looking for something. And then once they get to Reddit, they stay because they find that community. I don't think it's a coincidence, you know, that Reddit's having a cultural moment when there's such a need for community in the marketplace.

What are some of the fastest growing topic areas or interest areas you're seeing on Reddit?

I mean, look, Reddit encompasses almost the whole breadth of the human psyche, right? So there are things that are, you know, more commercial. So people come to Reddit to understand what should they buy, right? What, what's the best car? What's the best camping backpack? You know, what's the best recipe for using cream cheese? And in terms of growth, like we're seeing it across the board, you know, You know, it's not necessarily in a specific niche. Right.

What we're really— Like Discord was big for gaming, on gaming for a while.

I mean, there's some endemic categories. I mean, Reddit historically has been really big in gaming. Yeah. Really big in tech. But I'd say it really spans the whole gamut. And what was surprising to me, and look, I'm relatively new to Reddit, you know, I, I joined from Google, uh, back in September. And so, you know, almost half of the conversations that happen on Reddit are commercial in nature.

Really?

And a quarter of them are recommendations. So if you think about it, like one of the fun things about any hobby is you get with your friends or other people who are into your hobby and you're like, hey, what's the gear that you buy? Or if you're a golfer, you're like, what's the best resort destination to go play golf? And all of those things, even though they're fun and they're about your interest, they're inherently commercial, right? If you are a travel advertiser, right, you want to reach people at the point where they're talking about, you know, where to go. If you're a golf manufacturer, I mean, it kind of writes itself. And it's almost like the platform which was built for community and authentic conversation is indexed in a way that makes it easy for advertisers to engage, right? And understand where their communities of interest, their fans, and frankly even their detractors hang out and figure out how to engage in that conversation with them.

So what does advertising on Reddit look like? Like what does a brand need to do to make sure that they have the right resources internally to be able to take, because obviously you want to be native to the platform. And the way that you're coming into there, what is, what does that kind of integration process look like?

Yeah, so I think approaching Reddit, you know, in the way that's native to Reddit. So it's about authenticity and about having authentic conversation. And so if you're coming into a community to keep, stay with the golf example, and people are talking about where they want to travel, where they want to go, brands can come in and ask, What are the things that make you make those decisions?

Like, what are you actually looking for? Their branded account. And then you guys will—

We can amplify that. That's right. And look, you can dip your toe in by just saying, hey, you know, I'm selling cars, I have a new car launch, I'm going to take over the entire car category and just get a ton of unduplicated reach around people who I know are interested in my category. You know, so it can be anything as straightforward as finding the interests and the groups that you want to reach and just putting a branded message in front of them., but the people who really unlock the value of Reddit understand how to participate in the community, have a two-way conversation.

So community management where they're active more naturally outside of the paid ads they're doing.

Yeah. I mean, so Reddit has always had AMAs, ask me anything. Yeah. Uh, we actually just launched a more productized version of the AMA. Uh, and you know, for brands that are comfortable, um, going to those communities that are relevant to them and saying, look, here's who we are. We're people too, right? And, and to your point where you opened up this whole conversation, uh, people are craving that community and authentic conversation. They don't want to be marketed to. You know, one of the themes for us this week at CES is conversations are the new influencer, right? I think people have kind of seen through the paid influence and paid posts, and like, you know, people are too savvy for that.

One night stands where people getting paid to basically hold up of vitamin gummy inside.

Buy this. I don't think that's as interesting anymore. I think, I think the conversation where a brand can say, look, give us the goods and bads. And in some of the cases where, you know, brands have been brave enough to actually talk about things that maybe aren't perfect, they win a lot of credibility, um, with people who then go on to amplify organically. Um, I think that's something that emerged for us this week at CES. In almost every meeting with agencies and with brands, one, they were asking, how can we advertise more on Reddit? And as like the CRO, I appreciated that conversation. That must be nice. But they're all saying, look, we want to organically show up on Reddit. And I think as, as Reddit results have populated more on search results, you know, we've launched our own search and AI product. They see that the organic content actually is what SEO used to be. And there's kind of a new version of SEO that's happening that was on everyone's mind. And there's this really nice synergy between the paid aspect where you're getting your brand out in front of people who are really interested in your topic, and then they're going on to amplify that message by talking about it.

So you mentioned a couple of different product innovations that I want to just dig deeper into. Yeah. One, you said you have a new productized AMA. I assume that's Reddit Answers.

No, it's not. So AMA is actually a format where it's like a branded post in the conversation that happened organically.

But you said you have a productized version of that.

So, so yeah, that's right. So it's just some automation tools to make it a lot easier to structure.

Exactly.

Got it.

Exactly. So what is Reddit Answers?

So Reddit Answers is, um, basically the entry point into all of the richness of Reddit over the last 20 years, right? So if you think about what we have, Reddit is a community of communities. It's 20 years of conversations, billions and billions of posts. Um, and it's an amazingly rich dataset, but how do you get access to it? And Reddit Answers is an AI product that lets you in a search box query and question what you want to find. And we'll go through all of Reddit and pull back not like an AI-digested, you know, readout that could hallucinate or have missed context. We actually pull out the quotes from real people who are having conversations. Interesting. About what you're talking about. So stay with our golf example. If I typed in, you know, what are the best golf resorts for people who are high handicapper? It'll come back with, hey, in the r/golf subreddit, here's people talking about it and here's a quote from someone saying what they thought. You can click into that and actually go right into the conversation. And so in that conversation, you see the context, you see the people debating back and forth, but you also can participate. Like, that's the part that I think is so powerful. It's not like a static Google search. Yeah. Where you're just out and then you read it and you agree, you disagree. You can say, hey, that's right, but have you considered, you know, whatever, I'm a lefty and do they have clubs for me?, and people want to have that follow-up question, you know, further engagement and the context for why that recommendation was made. The product launched, you know, just recently. It's, it's rolled out to about 5% of users. I think we'll get to full GA, uh, you know, relatively soon. Um, but what it essentially does, if, if you think about Reddit up until this moment has been community conversation, all these topics of interest. And that's been the core use case and that'll always continue to be the case. But there's this other really compelling use case, which is I'm trying to solve a problem or find an answer, and I wanna mine the data of Reddit to be able to do that. People were doing that largely through Google, you know, coming and, and finding through our search. Reddit Answers really answers that question for people with that use case. It's the way that you find what you're looking for through all of the richness of Reddit.

As I hear you talk, I mean, what I'm trying to figure out and the answer is probably like the answer is yes to all of it, which is like where in the funnel does Reddit fit? Because obviously, you know, there's a whole section of the discovery and consideration phase, but in the conversion phase, you know, when people are willing to make a purchase, yeah, they're there as well. So like, is it full funnel and is there different approaches for companies depending upon where I guess the customer is in the decision-making cycle?

I love this question. So we're full funnel. Right. I think a lot of people say that, but I think when you look at the different products that we have, we really can match that up from, you know, awareness all the way down through conversion and post-sale support, which is really interesting. So from an awareness perspective, Reddit actually has incredible unduplicated reach. There are a lot of people on Reddit who are not on other social platforms. And so if you're trying to just build awareness, right, we have lots of amazing contextual signal. We have great keyword signal. So you can get pretty targeted and still have a lot of breadth. So there's a ton of stuff happening at the awareness phase. I'll skip down to, you know, conversion and performance. It's been a huge investment area for us in terms of the product enhancements, using our own AI and automation to just make that much easier. You know, as we've gone, you know, from bigger brands to mid-market through SMB, has to be a little bit easier, right, for, for brands that are less sophisticated or companies that are less sophisticated marketers. And so, you making it a lot easier for them to onboard and see results quickly. But consideration, like, I think you put your finger on it, like the mid-funnel, I think is Reddit's superpower. Yeah. Because we've been talking about this concept of conversations drive decisions. If you're thinking of buying an electric vehicle, you know, you're thinking of buying an electric car, you're gonna do a lot of research, you're gonna talk to people, you're gonna debate it back and forth. You're in market, you haven't decided which brand you're going to go with. That's the point. Like, that's the point of attack. Like, if I'm a marketer, I want to reach, you know, that person in that discussion in that moment and make my case, you know, and I think we have marketers or just I would say our industry in general focuses so much on the upper funnel and it's easy to look at lower funnel because it's so measurable. Middle funnel is harder. Yeah, right.

You have the consideration phase.

Yeah. Attribution issues, you know, becomes more opinionated.

It's more qualitative.

It can be more qualitative. But I think, you know, when you look at the conversations that are happening, we have brands, customers on our platform talking about the products that they're going to buy. They should be part of that conversation. We're fielding some research now to look at consideration and how it drives more efficiency in lower funnel performance. One of the things that we saw was a 10% lift in lower funnel efficiency if you bought Reddit for mid-funnel, right? So that doesn't mean you had to buy Reddit for lower funnel. You could buy Facebook, you could buy Google, you can do your lower funnel stuff, but come to us, take some of that budget, put it in, you know, mid-funnel consideration. Like, you've built this big brand, you're harvesting all the demand at the bottom of the funnel, but at the point where people are actually deciding, don't be absent. Be in that conversation and be present. The only other thing I'd add, and it's actually a surprisingly big category for us, is after you've bought a product, like one of the things that happens, you know, especially you make a big purchase, you immediately go on and want someone to validate that you made a good decision, you know? So you bought a new car or you, you know, you finally like closed your mortgage. Like, did I get a good deal? Right. And so there's actually a lot of post sale, support, post-sale conversation. And it's another place where brands can build loyalty.

Customer experience management.

Totally. You know, and help them to get the best. One of the examples that we talk about a lot, like you buy a pizza oven, right? You bought this thing, you're so excited, did all your research, you bring it home. How do I get the best pizza out of this pizza oven? Well, you go to our subreddit pizza and you're like, I got this model and you find all your people who have all the tips and tricks and hacks. That's a huge use case. And if I'm a brand, I wanna be part of that too. Congratulate you on what you bought and make sure that you're taking the best advantage of it.

So if I am an individual listening to this podcast and I've heard about Reddit, but I'm not a user, mm, like how do I start using Reddit?

So I think there, there's two ways. Uh-huh. Um, one, download the app, go on it today, poke around, you know, if you like cat memes, I think you'll be, you'll be entertained. Um, But there's the community aspect of it and there's the problem-solving piece. The, the real magic of Reddit I think gets unlocked when you find your community and you participate like a group, a group. So, you know, I don't know what, what's, what's an interest of yours?

You're— I love the Philadelphia Eagles.

Philadelphia Eagles, perfect. So, you know, we have a rights deal with the NFL where we actually have, you know, highlights of games. People come during the game, during an Eagles game, they'll do, you know, smack talking in a huge, you know, group chat environment. Um, and so for and against, and you get that whole experience. When you give something in, so you can go and read about it and read about, you know, what's happening with the Eagles. But, you know, if you have a strong point of view about whether the head coach should come back next year or whatever, make your case. And then there's lots of people who will agree, disagree, upvote. You know, one of the things we didn't talk about is the whole dynamic of upvoting and downvoting. So Reddit's unique in that it's not likes, it's upvote and downvote. And so what that means is that content that can be inherently polarizing gets a lot of upvotes, gets a lot of downvotes, and doesn't really get distribution. The things that get distribution that come up to the top of the feeds and the top of the page are things that people universally find interesting, valuable, funny, all that kind of stuff. I would highly encourage anyone who hasn't used Reddit to find communities. Everyone's got interests and participate, like actually be brave and post a question or post a comment. You get that first kind of response where someone's like, oh, that was a good comment. And you're like, oh, I added something, added something of value to the universe, you know? And people sort of give you literally karma points, right? Which is what we call it coming back to you. And so I think that's a big piece of it. I think most people at this point have ended up on Reddit because they've done a Google search and they found themselves there. Even on that front, like there's so much richness in just what are the things you're interested in? You know, what are some big purchases that are coming up? What are some of the things you own that you want to get more value out of? All of those things I think are really, you know, easy to do and sort of the first steps.

Yeah. So we're at CES here and CES has evolved so much. How many, how many times have you been here?

We were trying to remember. I can't remember how many.

Gotcha. We've been here for a while.

Many times.

And every year it becomes increasingly more inclusive in terms of the types of companies that are here. It used to just be, you know, literally consumer electronics. And now you have CPG companies and, you know, beverage and healthcare and kind of from everywhere. And for you, it must be a great opportunity. Beginning of the year, companies are planning to be able to tell the story of Reddit and hear what brands are interested in. Where, where are the most important priorities right now for the big brands that you want to serve? Like, what are you hearing from the market?

Yeah, well, I mean, you know, I'll talk briefly about AI just because I think everybody has, but it's present. And I think, you know, this is the year where AI has to go from, hey, we're doing AI to AI is actually doing something for us.

Right. With ROI.

Right? And so I think agencies are all trying to figure it out in their own way. You know, from a brand perspective, how is that going to change the way that they go to market themselves and the way that they work with, with platforms like ours? You know, I think from a, from a cultural perspective, there are a lot of things that are changing culturally. And one of the things that comes up all the time with Reddit is how do we tease insights out of the Reddit platform before they become a major trend, right? So we were sitting down with the CMO of a big, uh, uh, beauty and healthcare company, and there was a mascara trend that peaked last year, and they were like, that was actually talked about on Reddit like 5 years ago. And it was dormant, dormant, dormant, and then started to spike. And so they're looking to us to figure out how can they get ahead of the curve. You know, Steve Huffman, our CEO, talks a lot about the future is on Reddit, right? You just may not be seeing it, right? So people are talking about things that are going to happen, that are bubbling up, that trends happen. So we actually announced a product called Reddit Pro Trends. So Reddit Pro is our insights product, freely available to all brands, and they can track what people are saying about their company, about their products. Trends adds another level of depth into it where you can start to, see what is trending, put in your own custom kind of keywords and, and see what the organic activity on Reddit looks like. Uh, and there are a bunch of packaged—

what I like about it is that the data you're getting is in the wild. It's not, you know, it's like what people are actually naturally saying that's bubbled up. They're not in the forced environment where they're asked to identify trends. It's just whatever is really happening, they're naturally saying it.

The thing that was a little bit surprising to me, you know, coming, coming in as a new person to Reddit, like Reddit is an anonymous platform, right? You're not obligated to give your personal information. You're under a pseudonym. And, you know, from being on the internet a lot, you usually think that that leads to bad behavior and which it can, which it can. On Reddit, it actually leads to people being able to just be more open and honest, especially like health-related stuff. As a perfect example, you know, and so a lot of the community is around mental health or cancer survivors or, you know, things that you maybe would be pretty reticent to have just out there on LinkedIn under your, under your name, you talk about pretty freely. And so even for things that are less emotionally resonant about products and that kind of stuff, like, here's what I really think, you know, I don't— even if it's a contrarian view, I don't need to worry about it being out there that someone's going to call me out on it, you know, 6 months from now. So we get really that unvarnished opinion. Um, and then the upvoting and downvoting is a layer that kind of keeps that bad behavior from bubbling over. You know, if you're a troll in a community about beauty and healthcare, you'll get voted down and no one will ever see it. There's no incentive to actually have that behavior happen.

Yeah, makes sense. So you're relatively new in the role, and Reddit, as I mentioned, had a great 2024.

Yeah.

Um, the ads business grew 56% year over year. It's not easy to do in any market, let alone this market. What are some of your goals to make sure— because at the same time, I think a lot of brands don't really even know Reddit well relative to like certainly Facebook or Google or the other stuff. But you know, for everything we talked about, it really is a unique property. What are some of your plans to get out there in the marketplace, make sure brands have a full understanding so you can continue to drive growth?

Yeah, it's a great question. You know, you know, what I'd say is that what we're doing is working, right? The, the business is on a really high growth trajectory, um, and it's not about changing our strategy. To your point, I don't think we've told this story broadly and loudly enough. I'm here with you. This is one of the, you know, key strategic pillars is talking about how amazing our ads platform is, all these brands that are having great results. And to your point, I think we've moved more towards the mainstream, that we are viewed as a platform, you know, among the mainstream platforms that brands want to be on and they're trying to figure out, okay, we tested, how do we go bigger? Or we haven't done anything. How do we get started? I've had more than a few agencies and brands this week say we want to be your number one customer in our category. How do we do that? You know, how do we become a, you know, $100 million spender with you? And I think they're all the things we just talked about, the authenticity, all of the reasons why they want to be there. They get to keep driving the business. It's continue to execute There's tons of product innovation. You're investing in automation, the lower funnel products to make sure that we're driving more performance. Like those are, I think, table stakes, frankly, in our, in our industry. And, you know, we're market competitive. I think it's just really telling the story and helping people understand, you know, at the base of it, we're media, right? There's outcomes that you're going to drive. Like we can dress it all up in, you know, you know, conversations and all the ways and mechanisms that it happens. But, we want to be able to drive lower funnel always on, you know, efficient media for our partners, or we want to drive big brand lift for, you know, our awareness partners. Like in the end, we have to deliver outcomes. Yeah. I think for me coming in as a new leader, one of the things that I'm really focused on is understanding where we're actually winning, right? Within each vertical, we have kind of lighthouse partners who have figured it out. And how do we package that so that we can just say, yeah, we have a, you know, a pharma vertical that's crushing it. We should be, you know, a leading platform with all the big pharma advertisers and just go down the list, healthcare, finance, all the big categories. We're there, but we're there in pockets. Right. And I think from a go-to-market team, from a sales perspective, we can get really honed in on what works, deliver that solution repeatedly., and that's just an execution game.

Yeah, totally makes sense. So how are you spending your time, um, making sure that, cuz obviously if you're talking to these brands and you, I know it's from speaking to you, I think you're already doing it, but you know, they, you're setting the vision for Reddit in terms of how it goes to market.

Yeah.

Um, and you wanna make sure that when you're in front of these customers, either an agency or client side, you're effectively telling the story, you're showing your customers that you can be partners to them moving forward. Yeah. So in order to do that, where are you spending your time personally to try to make sure you continue to improve and drive growth?

Yeah. Look, in my first quarter at Reddit, it was drinking from the fire hose, you know, meeting the team. We have, you know, a presence in EMEA going out, you know, meeting the team there and just really understanding just the richness of everything we have to offer. You know, one of the pitfalls of being in a hypergrowth kind of company is there's no shortage of opportunities and ideas, you know, and the, the discipline. I think this is where I spent a lot of my Q4 is there are a lot of good ideas, but can we not do them to just focus on the great ideas and really hone in on what that looks like? In Q1, I told my team I'm launching meeting 60 customers in 60 days in Q1. In person. In person. Yeah, right. And so, I mean, CES is a good jump start, so I've got a decent way there, but One, because I need to be in market a lot to really understand the goods and the bads. Like, what are the objections?

Yeah, exactly.

If people are not spending with us, why is that? And how is that something we already have a solve and they don't know? And so, you know, being in market is a huge piece of it. And also just, you know, look, the team, I would say we're, we're at a point where we've grown, you know, quite a large media business, but we're just getting started. So the infrastructure, both from a team perspective and operational perspective that we need to 5x, 10x the business, starting to get those, you know, shovels in the ground now so that when, you know, we hit those points and the infrastructure starts bursting at the seams, we're not first, you know, putting in the new supports. Um, we've got that infrastructure in place.

Makes sense. Yeah. So prior to Reddit, you spent first nearly 10 years at LinkedIn. Starting in kind of the very early days of LinkedIn. And then you spent another 3 to 4 years at Google. What were some of your key takeaways from working at both of those companies? Yeah. That have helped you round yourself out as a professional?

Yeah, I think from LinkedIn it was interesting. We went from a desktop display business to primarily in-feed mobile. Yeah. You know, lead gen business.

Programmatic.

Yeah. You know, and that transition was crazy. Right? And it was an exercise in focus and really saying, what's the future going to look like? And the future was going to look like everyone's going to use LinkedIn on an app. Everyone's going to, you know, advertise in feed. How do we, you know, align to that trend? And it meant letting go of a lot of stuff that we had done in the past. And so that was like a really clear lesson that served me super well. Google is an amazing education in just super scale. And what it means to run a business at, you know, billions and billions of dollars scale. Right. And, you know, if you want to move that ship even a degree to the right, you know, the change management and the complexity around that is pretty amazing. But when you do it, you have incredible resources behind you and you can just see things start to happen. I think taking those things coming into, into Reddit, you know, we're in this hypergrowth mode. We're transitioning not between platforms, but from being a, you know, a, a, we're now a mainstream platform that everyone wants to be on. That was not the case a couple years ago. And so how do we let go of some of the old stuff that made sense when we were, you know, in that position, but now we're in a very different position and lean into the stuff that's actually gonna be the future. That's hard. You know, and the, the change management, especially for folks who have, frankly built this company for a long period of time. Yeah. How do we take the best of that and kind of bring it forward, but also realize that what got us here isn't going to get us there? I think that's, that's one of the key pieces. You know, from a leadership perspective, I'm a very people-oriented leader. You know, at the end of the day, it's just people doing stuff and they have to want to do it. They have to know how to do it. They have to know why they are doing it. And I think the more you can help people understand the vision for where we're going, where they fit into it, why some of the decisions get made, something you get excited about, that's where you really see unexpected and exponential transformation. For sure. You know, when you pay people to do stuff, they'll do the minimum amount they can get away with to get paid. You know, that's sort of the transactional—

Coin-operate it, so to speak.

Yeah, that's the transactional mode. When you empower people and get them excited, the intrinsic motivation is just off the charts. And so Reddit already has that, like it's, it's a rocket ship. People are super excited if you can fire in them instead of under them.

Yeah, totally.

Totally. I love that.

Yeah. So it's been a great conversation and, you know, not only to hear about Reddit, but to hear about your approach and, you know, there's no doubt you're going to continue to be successful in 2025. Um, as we wrap up here, um, as you know, we, we end our podcast normally by asking our guests if there's a mantra or saying that has guided their professional journey today? Would just love to hear what comes to mind for you and why.

I love that. We almost just touched on it. You know, look, my personal commitment is to help as many people as possible, personally and professionally. And a lot of my professional development and frankly, my career growth has been being really comfortable being myself, the person outside of work and inside of work. And when I think about how I can help people, That means people who work for me who maybe want to go take another job, you know, how do you support them and encourage them to do that? I think we all know this is a small industry, but just in general, you don't know how the future is going to unfold. And so if you really—

it's a long road—

if you really try hard to help as many people as possible, in the end, I think it's going to work out pretty well.

Yeah, I love that. And paying it forward and just trying to do right by people over time.

100%.

Awesome. Well, thanks so much for taking time out of your busy schedule here at CES to tell us your story and tell us about all the exciting things at Reddit. Yeah, thanks so much. This was great. Absolutely. On behalf of Susie and Adweek Keen, thanks again to Mike Romoff, the Chief Revenue Officer of Reddit, for joining us today. Be sure to subscribe, rate, and review the Speed of Culture podcast on your favorite podcast platform. We're here in Vegas live at CES. See you soon. Bye-bye.