Reddit is super-popular with millennials — and I think I know why

Reddit’s user base is more than 40% millennial, according to a new Emarketer report — making that generation the platform’s most well-represented.

Reddit is the social platform most saturated by millennials, according to an Emarketer report on US digital habits by generation.

Of logged-in users on Reddit, 43.3% are millennials, compared to 29.6% who are Gen Z. (Compare this to Snapchat, where a whopping 52.3% of users are Gen Z, but only 32.9% are millennials.)

So why is Reddit such a millennial haven? I have a few theories.

Reddit’s text-based forum style feels familiar to millennials — we grew up with this kind of format, and we’re used to it. Gen Z might spend more overall minutes per day on digital platforms, but they vastly prefer visual and video formats like YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat. Millennials still like to read and type.

Millennials are also at a point in their lives when the type of content that thrives on Reddit is probably a big draw: Things like home improvement, gardening, lawncare, parenting, personal finance, investment advice — those are things that people in their 30s and 40s start wanting to talk about, and those are all huge topics on Reddit.

At some point, there comes a day when you stop being cool and start wanting to learn about woodworking. Time comes for us all.

It’s important to note: The report from Emarketer, which is a sister company to B-17, doesn’t say that more than 40% of millennials use Reddit — just that of the people who do regularly use Reddit, 43.3% are millennials.

Zooming out, among all millennials, only 35.6% are regular Reddit users, making the platform much less popular than YouTube, for instance, which the Emarketer report says is used by more than 82% of millennials, and Facebook, which is used by 78.7%. The report is based on Emarketer’s forecasts from earlier this year.

Reddit’s traffic has grown significantly recently. In the second quarter of this year, it reported 51% growth in daily active users compared to the same period last year — far outpacing other social platforms.

A lot of that new traffic is coming from Google search results. Some people have even started to type “reddit” at the end of their search queries to try to find better results.

And if you look at some of the most popular subreddits, some of them feel very, uh, Peak Millenial. Aside from the main ones like r/funny, r/AskReddit, etc., there are things that feel like relics from another time in millennial-based internet culture: r/AnimalsBeingDerps, r/rarepuppers, r/reactiongifs.

Maybe Reddit is a safe space for millennials to be cringe and free.