Reddit (RDDT) stock pops on strong advertising and user growth

Reddit‘s stock popped more than 18% Friday after the company surpassed third-quarter estimates and signaled strong advertising growth.

The social media platform’s revenues surged 68% from a year ago to $585 million, beating an LSEG estimate of $546 million. Earnings per share totaled 80 cents, surpassing an estimate of 51 cents.

Reddit also released a better-than-expected sales outlook for the fourth quarter. The company projects between $655 million and $665 million, topping the $638 million forecast from Wall Street.

These results “speak to the company’s continued progress across its ad and platform initiatives,” wrote Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak. “We see a long runway for growth across both active advertisers (+75% y/y in 3Q) as well as greater penetration within existing advertisers.”

Reddit said that nine of its top 15 advertiser verticals grew more than 50%. Nowak highlighted Reddit’s ongoing investments in automation, which are improving return on advertising spending.

The number of daily active users jumped 19% from the year-ago period to 116 million, surpassing Wall Street’s 114 million estimate.

Reddit has attracted more people to the platform from Google, and generated advertising dollars from those who create accounts. The company makes more money off of logged-in users, and has raised concerns as of late that AI chat apps, including ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overview could impact new user growth.

“I’m looking forward to continuing to work on these things with these partners, but they’re not a major traffic driver today,” CEO Steve Huffman said during the earnings call. “But I think there’s plenty of opportunity there as we continue to work together.”

The company’s daily active unique users rose 7% from last year to 23.1 million, but lagged the 12% growth seen in the second quarter. Globally, logged-in users grew 14% to 50.2 million.

Reddit’s other revenues, which include data licensing partnerships with Google and OpenAI, grew 7% from a year ago to $36 million.