Why these ten
Six of the ten companies on this week's board reported earnings from October 27 to 29: Robinhood, SoFi, Vertiv, Reddit, Coinbase and Strategy. A company files its quarter with the SEC, the US market regulator, and the finance sites write about it. That's earnings week.
MercadoLibre was there because Lula won Brazil's election and Brazilian stocks fell. Lumentum was there because of reports that Marvell wanted to buy it. It filed nothing with the SEC that week, and filed its results and an agreement on November 2. Nebius rents out AI chips, like CoreWeave, and its headlines followed CoreWeave's.
CoreWeave led the board for the second week running, without filing anything with the SEC from October 25 to 31. The headlines were about its debt, and a 24/7 Wall St. headline on October 26 had Elon Musk predicting a "guppy-level death" for companies like it. Of all the finance-site hype we count, CoreWeave's share fell from 2.6% the week before to 0.8%. It still came first.
Reddit got on the board through the back door
The board measures the hype around a stock: how it's seen through the lens of social media and traditional media. The finance and news sites weigh the most. Reddit and Yahoo Finance's trending list are the smaller parts of the score. This week, Reddit got on the board through the smaller parts.
Smallest on the finance sites
On the finance sites, Reddit was the smallest of the ten: 0.2% of all the finance-site hype we count, against 0.8% for CoreWeave. It had headlines. More sites wrote about Reddit than about any other company on the board, 89 on a single day. But most of the headlines were plain news about the quarter, with few hype words. The score counts the hype words, weighed by how many people read the site, and the share is measured against every company we count.
The smaller parts
Reddit made up the difference on the smaller parts of the score: mentions on Reddit, where it led the ten, and Yahoo Finance's trending list, where it was second, behind SoFi. That carried the stock to fourth place. In the week to October 25 it was 59th among the mid-size companies.
An anomaly
The board isn't built for this. The sites weigh far more than the other parts, so a stock that's small on the finance sites has a long way to climb. The other nine all had a bigger share of the finance-site hype than Reddit. Reddit made it anyway. That's why Gus picked it for this week's article.
Reddit grew 53% and lost 29% in a day
Reddit reported its third quarter after the market closed on October 29. Sales were $895 million, up 53% from a year earlier. Net income was $283 million. The stock closed at $129.60 that day and at $91.73 the next, down 29%. Over the week it fell 36%.
On the surface that makes no sense. The company grew by half and the market took a third off the price.
It makes sense once you read past the first table in the shareholder letter. Reddit expects $1,000 million to $1,030 million in sales in the fourth quarter. That's growth of 38 to 42%, down from 53%. Daily users could fall. And Reddit wants its visitors to log in.
Most of Reddit's visitors aren't logged in
Reddit counts its users in two groups. Logged-in users are signed in to an account. Logged-out users read without signing in, with or without an account. Reddit's quarterly report says who arrives logged out: "Visitors that come to Reddit from search engines are generally not logged in."
In the third quarter Reddit had 130.3 million daily active uniques, its count of unique visitors per day. 76.8 million of them were logged out. That's 59%.
The US
Now look at the US, where the money is. Reddit made $13.82 per US user in the quarter, against $2.43 per user outside the US. US logged-in users were 23.0 million in the first quarter of 2025 and 23.4 million in the third quarter of 2026: seven quarters in a row between 22.9 and 23.4 million. US logged-out users went from 30.1 million to 27.3 million in a single quarter, down 9%.
Who brings in the money
And you might think: fine, the logged-out crowd doesn't bring in much anyway. Reddit agrees. COO Jen Wong on the call: monetization "sits on the shoulders of logged-in and app users." CEO Steve Huffman put a number on it: "over 80% of our revenue comes from logged-in users."
So the users who bring in the money haven't grown in the US for a year and a half, and the users who bring in less are leaving. US revenue rose 50% from a year earlier while US users fell 2%. That's a good quarter. It's also the same 23 million logged-in people.
Where the visitors came from
Before the IPO
Reddit told investors about this before it went public. From its IPO prospectus, the document a company files before its shares start trading, February 2024: "in December 2023, logged-out users comprised 75% of the incremental users added since July 2023, and logged-out users typically come to Reddit via search engines, spend less time on the site, and do not monetize at the same rate as logged-in users."
Three of every four new users before the IPO were logged out, the kind that typically arrives from search. The growth was real. It was also Google's to give.
Google keeps the click
Google now answers more questions itself, with an AI summary at the top of the results. Pew Research followed the searches of 900 US adults in March 2025. On pages with an AI summary, people clicked a regular link in 8% of visits, against 15% on pages without one. They clicked a link inside the summary in 1%. Reddit is one of the three sources those summaries cite most, with Wikipedia and YouTube. So Google's answer cites Reddit, and the reader no longer has to click through.
Google's blog said in August 2025 that click volume was "relatively stable" and that "People are increasingly seeking out and clicking on sites with forums, videos, podcasts, and posts." Fourteen months later, Reddit's shareholder letter said its search referrals "dropped by more than 1 million referrals on average per week" in October. Huffman on Google's AI answers: "it's just not a traffic driver. So we're not counting on that."
The wall
Reddit's answer is to make the visitors log in. The shareholder letter: "In Q4 we'll begin fully testing this in select markets outside the U.S. The results of those tests will inform an optimized version of logged-in-only Reddit globally." The quarterly report goes further: "some form of logged-in restrictions globally, including in the United States."
Test or rollout
Cybernews called it a rollout. The letter calls it a test. Huffman on the call: "This is a test, but we are going to make this transition."
Eight months earlier
In its annual report in February 2026, Reddit wrote that its "focus has shifted to delivering immediate value for all users ... regardless of whether they are logged in or logged out," and that from the third quarter of 2026 it would stop reporting the two groups separately. In October it still reported them, and logged out had become the thing to fix.
The data
The letter gives four reasons: more signals for ad targeting, higher engagement, protecting "Reddit's extremely valuable corpus of data," and new regulations. The corpus is what AI companies train on, and Huffman said "the vast majority of the scraping and stealing of Reddit happens in our logged-out user base." Does a wall stop them? Huffman: "Will this make Reddit harder to scrape? For sure. ... It's not impossible."
The wall protects data Google's answers already cite.
How many visitors turn into accounts
Huffman's answer: "Making Reddit logged-in only will assuredly grow that base. But what the conversion rate is over time, we just don't know."
The peers
He also said: "Each of our peers have had a lot of success doing this." So look at the peers. Quora asks readers to log in to read more, and Instagram has had a login wall since 2019. We found no published numbers on what the wall did to their traffic, and the words "logged out" and "unauthenticated" appear nowhere in Pinterest's annual reports or IPO prospectus. A lot of success, and nobody shows the numbers. Could it be that they aren't worth showing?
What has been measured
What has been measured is smaller. Rest of World, a news site, put up a free sign-up wall in 2026. When it cut the free articles from five to three, the share of readers who reached the wall went from about 1% to 3%. It got 1.5 to 2.7 verified sign-ups per 1,000 page views, and about 87% of the readers who started signing up finished. Its write-up calls the wall "an unreasonable interruption" for a first-time visitor. That's why readers get three articles first. Reddit says it will also show "some version of Reddit" before "that hard prompt." How much, it hasn't said.
Baymard Institute asks US online shoppers why they abandoned an order. Leaving out those who were just browsing, 18% say the site wanted them to create an account. Those people had come to buy something.
Search traffic cuts both ways
According to Similarweb data analyzed by Graphite, Quora lost 45% of its organic search visits from 2024 to 2025. Instagram, which also has a login wall, gained 21%. Graphite gives no reason for either. The wall alone didn't decide it.
The strict version
A paywall is the strict version. When three of Gannett's local newspapers put one up in 2010, at $9.95 a month, visits fell 51% (Chiou and Tucker). Reddit's wall asks for an account.
Reddit has done the unpopular thing before
Reddit has done the unpopular thing before. In June 2023 it changed the terms for the outside apps that read Reddit's data, and moderators shut down some communities in protest. Logged-in daily users grew 14% from a year earlier in the second quarter of 2023, 19% in the third and 21% in the fourth, about where growth was in 2022. The prospectus says user growth in the fourth quarter of 2023 "may have been driven in part by performance improvements in our product and possibly by migration of usage from certain third-party applications," and that "such growth may not be sustainable." Those users already had accounts.
Every network gets old
Every social network has a sell-by date. MySpace was the internet once. Facebook today is ads, your grandmother and birthday reminders.
Facebook is also the clearest case in the numbers. In 2014 and 2015, 71% of US teenagers aged 13 to 17 used it, according to Pew. In 2025, 31%. US adults stayed: 70% used Facebook in 2026, and 69% of those aged 18 to 29. The teenagers of 2014 are in that group now. Today's teenagers didn't come. The network didn't die. It got old with its users, and the next ones went somewhere else.
The next generation
So where do Gen Z and Gen Alpha go? Pew asks US teenagers every year which apps they use. In 2025, 17% said Reddit. TikTok: 68%. YouTube: 92%. Reddit sat at 14% three years running, from 2022 to 2024, and the step to 17% is inside the survey's margin of error.
The young haven't stopped talking to strangers. In 2023, 28% of US teenagers used Discord, where groups talk in chat rooms. That's twice Reddit's share the same year. Roblox, the game platform, had 138 million daily users in the third quarter, and of the users who took its age check, 34% were under 13. Robux is the money inside Roblox, bought with real dollars. Roblox's quarterly report: "We generate substantially all of our revenue through the sale of or access to virtual items to users." Ask any parent.
A Reddit upvote is free, and for Gen Alpha, the youngest, it isn't worth much. Without Robux, you're a scrub.
The form
The difference is the form. Reddit is a forum: you search a question, land on a thread and read long answers from strangers. That's the internet of the 2000s, and it runs on search. TikTok doesn't wait for a question. You open it and the feed picks for you. Discord is a chat. Roblox is a game with a wallet. A generation raised on a feed now meets a forum that asks for an account first. Reddit's quarterly report names another door: laws that require age checks, which it says "could create barriers to account creation and sign-in." Reddit no longer decides how the young talk to each other. TikTok, Discord and Roblox do.
Reddit's generation
Reddit has its generation. Among US adults aged 18 to 29, 40% use it, more than in any older age group (Pew, 2026). The share of all US adults who use it more than doubled, from 11% in 2019 to 26% in 2025. Could much of that have come through Google's door? In 2026 it was 25%, the first dip since Pew started counting Reddit, and inside the margin of error. Reddit began in 2005. Its form is twenty years old, and it feeds on an old habit: typing a question into a search engine. The format stays, for the people who already use it. It won't grow with the next generation.
Why the wall won't fix it
Reddit has two problems. Fewer people find it through Google, and the next generation is on other apps. The wall answers neither.
Locking the door
The wall will turn some readers into accounts. Huffman: it "will assuredly grow that base." The question is who stands behind it. Mostly people from a search engine, who came for one answer. Rest of World got fewer than three sign-ups per 1,000 page views. Among Baymard's shoppers who abandoned an order, not counting those just browsing, 18% left because the site wanted an account, and they had come to buy. A Reddit reader from Google has come for a thread, and has a way out one click back: Google's AI summary, which cites Reddit.
Instagram has a login wall and gained 21% in search visits. But Instagram is where the young want to be: 63% of US teenagers used it in 2025, and 79% of adults aged 18 to 29 in 2026. People log in to Instagram to be there. They land on Reddit for an answer. Quora also asks readers to log in to read more, and it lost 45% of its search visits. Was it the wall? Google's AI answers? Both?
The AI answers
Google's AI summaries cite Reddit more than almost any other source. That sounds like a win. A citation isn't a visit. On pages with a summary, people clicked a regular link in 8% of visits and a link inside the summary in 1%. In October, Reddit's search referrals fell by more than 1 million a week. The better Reddit's threads, the better Google's answer, and the less reason to click.
Reddit does get paid for its data. Other revenue, content licensing plus products sold directly to users, was $48 million in the third quarter, up 35% from a year earlier and about 5% of sales. The annual report says "substantially all" of the licensing contract value comes from two partners, and that the deals "may not be renewed." The other 95% of sales is ads, and ads need people on the page.
What the market is pricing
Teenagers aren't Reddit's crowd. Young adults are. Reddit is something people find later, and for new users the way in has been search. Before the IPO, three of every four new users arrived logged out. That door is narrowing, and the wall makes it narrower still.
The stock lost 29% on a quarter with sales up 53%. The market priced the outlook: growth slowing to 38 to 42%, daily users that could fall, and a test of the login wall. A Reddit that keeps its users and stops adding new ones is a different stock. To grow with the next generation, Reddit would have to rethink the form. The wall only changes the door.
Gus's read
So does it look good or bad? For the user number, bad. For the money, survivable.
The user number
The people who already have an account will log in. The wall hits the visitor who is interested but hasn't committed: someone who searched a question, landed on a thread and wanted the answer. Friction costs exactly that person. Getting that person to make an account is a feat in itself, and in seven quarters of open doors, US logged-in users went from 23.0 to 23.4 million. Reddit is betting a door does what seven quarters didn't. And Reddit says daily users could fall "by a low-double-digit percentage" in the fourth quarter, from 130 million, if search traffic keeps falling at October's rate. Ten percent is 13 million visitors a day.
The money
The money is the better half. Over 80% of revenue already comes from logged-in users. If the wall mostly sends away people who were never logged in, it mostly sends away the people who brought in the least. Huffman called it "trading reach for engagement."
The catch
The catch is what Reddit sold. User growth was the story at the IPO. Now investors are asked to value the 53.5 million logged-in users instead. Reddit is already paying for reach: sales and marketing cost $209.4 million in the third quarter, 63% more than the $128.7 million a year earlier, and the letter says Reddit is "driving reach primarily through user marketing." The quarterly report names the risk: the test could hurt "the total number of Reddit users and/or the reach of advertisements."
Reddit is where the internet goes to ask strangers for advice. Soon you'll need an account to read the answers.
The fourth-quarter letter is the first place the test can show up in the numbers. We'll check back.
