Reddit Will Start Requiring Users to Log In as Huffman Calls It a "Logged-In-Only Experience"
After two decades of letting anyone browse freely, Reddit is putting up a login wall.
Reddit, $RDDT, is going to start requiring users to log in, with CEO Steve Huffman saying the platform is becoming a "logged-in-only experience."
"A key piece of work to retain new audiences is shifting Reddit to a logged-in-only experience," Huffman wrote in the company's shareholder letter.
"Moving to primarily logged-in will ensure our users have the best Reddit experience possible, and can find the content and communities most relevant to them," he added.
Why Reddit Is Doing It
Huffman laid out four reasons for the change: a better user experience, a stronger ads business, alignment with safety regulations, and protecting Reddit's data.
"It is better for our business because we will have more signals for ads targeting, and being logged-in leads to higher engagement generally," Huffman said.
Logged-in users already account for over 80% of Reddit's monetization, per the company.
The data protection angle matters just as much. Most unauthorized scraping of Reddit's content happens through its logged-out experience, and Reddit's corpus of human conversation has become one of the most valuable training datasets in AI.
Reddit licenses that data to Google and OpenAI, and it has sued Anthropic, Perplexity AI, and three data scraping companies, accusing them of illegally collecting its data.
Search Traffic Is Drying Up
The shift also comes as Google's AI search features eat into the referral traffic Reddit has long depended on.
"Google is crawling us as hard as ever, so the demand hasn't changed from their point of view either. The reality is, the AI mode does not drive traffic, not for us and not to anybody," Huffman said on the earnings call.
The pressure showed up in Thursday's third-quarter results. Ad revenue grew 54% to $847 million, but US daily users fell to 50.7 million from 53.2 million in the second quarter.
Reddit shares fell sharply after hours on the user miss and a fourth-quarter EBITDA guide of $480 million to $510 million, below the roughly $512 million analysts expected.
"Requiring users to log in creates another barrier to engagement, particularly for casual users," said Luke Stillman, a managing director at research firm Madison and Wall, per Reuters.
Tests Start Outside the US
Reddit plans to test the logged-in-only experience in select markets outside the US in the fourth quarter, before deciding on a wider rollout.
Huffman said the company is still figuring out where logged-out visitors will hit a "hard prompt" to log in, noting that people arriving from a shared link or a search result may still see some version of Reddit first.
He also stressed that logging in will not mean handing over an identity. "We don't need your name. We don't need to know who you are. We don't need to know your identity. Honestly, we don't want to know," Huffman said.
Reddit is also bringing back a redesigned incognito mode in its mobile app, which will let users browse read-only without affecting their personalization.
What It Means for the Options Market
The login shift is a direct bet on Reddit's two revenue engines: advertising, where logged-in signals drive targeting, and data licensing, where keeping scrapers out protects the value of deals with names like Google.
Watch RDDT first for flow around the test rollout and any user-growth updates, GOOGL as Reddit's largest licensing partner and the source of its search traffic problem, and social peers META and SNAP for read-through on how investors price logged-in engagement across the sector.
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