Reddit login required: 60% of its daily visitors read without an account

Reddit will require a login to browse, chief executive Steve Huffman confirmed with the third-quarter results on 29 October. The test starts this quarter in selected markets outside the US. Reddit has set no date for a global rollout and has not decided how much a logged-out visitor will still see before the prompt. Huffman said people arriving from shared links or search would see a version of the page first.

“A key piece of work to retain new audiences is shifting Reddit to a logged-in-only experience”

— Steve Huffman, Reddit CEO, in the third-quarter shareholder letter, 29 October 2026, as quoted by Engadget · engadget.com

Why now

Huffman gave two reasons. Logged-in users give more signals for ad targeting, and logged-out traffic is where outsiders take the content: "The vast majority of the scraping and stealing of Reddit happens in our logged-out user base." That content is also what Reddit sells. Data licensing, mostly deals with Google and OpenAI, brought $48 million in the quarter, up 35%.

Google is behind the timing too. Huffman said referrals from Google search fell "meaningfully" this quarter as Google pushed AI Overviews and AI Mode, and he expects the decline to continue in the fourth quarter.

The quarter in numbers

• Revenue: $895 million, up 53%, above the $878 million analysts expected. It ends a run of eight quarters above 60% growth.
• Daily active uniques: 130.3 million worldwide, up 12% but below the 133.7 million forecast.
• US daily uniques: 50.7 million, down 2% on the year.
• Average revenue per user: $6.87.
• Fourth-quarter revenue guidance: $1.00 to $1.03 billion, against $1.05 billion expected.

The shares fell more than 15% after the report.

Logged-out readers have carried Reddit's growth. In the second quarter PPC Land counted 77.7 million logged-out daily uniques, up 27%, against 52.6 million logged-in, up 7%.

Our count

• In the second quarter, 77.7 million of Reddit's 130.3 million daily uniques were logged out. That is 60% of the daily audience that a hard login wall would ask to sign up or leave.
• Data licensing is 5.4% of revenue. Ads bring the other 94.6%, and Huffman named ad targeting as the first reason for the login.
• The midpoint of the guidance is 3.3% below what analysts wanted.
• US daily uniques of 50.7 million are about half of the 100 million Reddit has set as its internal goal for the country.

Reddit is already in the EU's toughest platform tier under the Digital Services Act, so any test market inside the EU puts the login wall in front of regulators who already watch Reddit. If you read Reddit through search without an account, expect a sign-up prompt outside the US first. And if you train an LLM or build AI tools on scraped forum text, the scraping fight moves behind a login.

This piece is for information and does not recommend buying or selling Reddit shares. Figures come from Reddit's third-quarter results as reported by CNBC and PPC Land, the shareholder letter quote from Engadget.