Reddit has long been a major source of traffic for millions of sites. Millions of people visit Reddit to find news and other information that is published throughout the web. Over the past year, however, the total percentage of traffic sites see coming from Reddit has dropped significantly. There seems to be several reasons that are causing this, including the fact that more people are staying on Reddit rather than clicking away, and Facebook has made changes which have dramatically increased the referral traffic coming from them.
This is important for marketers who use Reddit to help drive traffic, whether through direct efforts, or by other visitors posting content from a site onto Reddit. It is always important to keep up with the latest trends in web based traffic.
While the percentage of traffic coming from Reddit to other web properties has gone down by about 36% year-over-year, the actual total amount of traffic Reddit is getting is up by 83% during the same time period. This is quite significant, because it shows just how dramatic the drop is in the amount of visitors Reddit is referring out, which is what the site was originally made to do.
Reddit has made some important changes to try to keep visitors on their own page longer, which have clearly been successful. For example, the Reddit ‘Ask Me Anything’ series drives huge amounts of traffic, which does not get referred out at any point.
Another factor may be related to Facebook’s changes to include more news related items in the news feeds. People no longer need to go to sites like Reddit to get news and current event items like they once did. This is shown through statistics which show that over the past year, 40% of sites tracked by the Parse.ly analytics system saw a 30+% increase in traffic from Facebook.
While Reddit is still a major player in traffic generation, it seems to be moving away from that very rapidly. Whether this is entirely intentional by Reddit or not, it is something marketers need to keep in mind when planning their traffic generation strategies.
You can see more data from the Parse.ly post HERE.
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