Reddit to Let Brands Use Your Positive Posts as Ads—And You Won’t See a Dime
Reddit has officially blurred the line between community and commerce. At the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the company unveiled a new feature called Reddit Community Intelligence—and it’s already raising eyebrows among users.
The feature allows brands to turn user-generated content—specifically positive comments and recommendations—into advertisements, displaying them directly beneath sponsored posts. That’s right: your glowing review of a skincare product or your excitement about a new EV model could soon become part of an official ad campaign. And no—you won’t get a cut.
Reddit says the new feature is powered by AI that combs through threads to find favorable comments about a brand or product. Those posts are then highlighted as “community conversation” beneath a paid advertisement. In early tests, the company claims the feature increased ad clickthrough rates by 19% compared to traditional ad formats.
From a brand perspective, this is gold. Positive social proof—especially when it’s unpaid and organic—is one of the most persuasive tools in a marketer’s arsenal. Reddit’s vast ecosystem of discussions, recommendations, and reviews has long been a goldmine for authentic consumer insights. Now, it’s being turned into a literal advertising asset.
But from a user perspective, the reaction is more mixed.
Free Labor for Corporations?
The big concern: users aren’t being compensated. If your post helps sell a product, you won’t be notified, credited, or rewarded. It’s a model that feels eerily similar to what critics have dubbed “user exploitation”—where platforms profit off community-generated content while offering little to no benefit in return.
Presumably, users who post positively about a product might not object to their comments being repurposed in ads—but the lack of transparency and monetization raises ethical concerns.
After all, Redditors are not brand ambassadors, and their posts weren’t written with the expectation that they’d become billboard slogans.
Reddit’s Post-IPO Monetization Push
The new ad feature is part of Reddit’s broader effort to prove its profitability after going public earlier this year. As part of that strategy, the platform has been aggressively rolling out new monetization models.
Just months ago, CEO Steve Huffman floated the idea of paywalled subreddits, where users would pay to access exclusive content—another move that triggered backlash from parts of the community. Reddit would take a percentage of that revenue, adding yet another income stream.
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And now, with Reddit Community Intelligence, the company is doubling down on advertising innovation, using its community as a resource for marketers.
In a conversation with Axios, Huffman defended the move, saying Reddit is simply formalizing what’s already happening on the site. “Half of the conversations on Reddit are basically commercial in nature,” Huffman said. “It turns out within every hobby, within every passion, within all these travel decisions, you’re actually kind of deciding what to buy next.”
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That sentiment aligns with recent findings by Marketing Brew, which reported that more users are turning to Reddit over Google when making purchasing decisions—citing the platform’s human, authentic tone.
In short, Reddit is cashing in on its new role as a decision-making engine
What This Means for Reddit Users
The launch of Reddit Community Intelligence represents a significant shift in how online conversations are valued and utilized. It begs the question: Who owns your words once they’re online?
As social platforms lean further into AI and monetization, the boundary between content creation and exploitation continues to blur. For Reddit, a platform built on pseudonymity and free expression, the risk lies in alienating the very users that make it valuable.
While Reddit may see increased revenue and improved ad performance, it remains to be seen how its community will respond. After all, Reddit’s greatest strength has always been its fiercely independent user base—and if those users feel like unpaid laborers in a marketing machine, the backlash could be swift.
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