• Reddit, the hugely influential internet message board platform, is opening a dedicated Australian office in Sydney.
• The company’s Australian operations will include community engagement, engineering, and sales teams, to be helmed by former WooliesX head strategist David Ray.
• The move comes after an explosive growth in the site’s Australian userbase, led by interest in finance ‘subreddits’ like r/AusFinance and the looser r/ASX_Bets.
• Visit Business Insider Australia’s homepage for more stories.

Reddit has announced the opening of a dedicated Australian office in Sydney, promising to boost engagement with local users and advertisers after the spectacular growth of communities like r/AusFinance and r/ASX_Bets over the past twelve months.

In a Monday morning announcement, Reddit revealed plans for its new Barangaroo office, housing community engagement, engineering, and sales teams to service the company’s fourth-largest market.

The site’s Australian headquarters will be helmed by David Ray, formerly of Woolworths Group’s digital arm WooliesX. Reddit’s Australian wing will be administrated under the company’s global operations.

The announcement comes after a remarkable year for the platform, which bills itself as the ‘front page of the internet’.

Reddit allows users to create and administrate open forums, where other users can converge broad or niche interests, ‘upvote’ the most compelling discussions and content, and, in some cases, form influential online communities.

The site made international headline news early this year when the users of American ‘subreddit’ r/WallStreetBets staged a semi-coordinated run on the stock of U.S. video game retailer GameStop, sending its share price into the stratosphere.

A fascination with ‘meme stocks’, combined with a growing local interest in day trading and cryptocurrencies, saw Australian subreddits like r/AusFinance and the somewhat less conservative r/ASX_Bets balloon in size through 2020 and early 2021.

According to Reddit analytics site SubredditStats, r/AusFinance more than doubled its userbase to 213,000 over the financial year. Over the same time period, r/ASX_Bets, the Antipodean cousin to r/WallStreetBets, grew from 10,000 users to more than 70,000, aided by January’s frantic interest in GameStop and other hyped investments.

Jen Wong, Reddit COO, said building the company’s relationships with these finance-focused forums is a key component of its Australian strategy.

“We’re establishing our official Australian presence to grow our local communities with local context and nuance — including with an on-the-ground community team to foster Australian user and moderator relationships — and build out our Australian ads business to bring more local brands onto the platform,” Wong told Business Insider Australia.

“Our financial communities in Australia have been some of our most popular for several years now, so we’re of course looking forward to scaling these via our dedicated local team.”

The company is already working with local moderators to “grow our local communities across all interest groups,” Wong added.

“Reddit has long been home to thriving financial communities in Australia so they will be included in this effort along with our entertainment, sport, news and politics interest groups which are also very popular among our Australian users.”

Reddit hopes to leverage its unique reach and engagement figures to lure advertisers away from social media firms which already have strong Australian foundations.

The company claims the average Australian Reddit user spends 31 minutes on the platform each day, surpassing the average time spent on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest. This Australian userbase is highly engaged, contributing 158 million posts, comments, and votes each month, Reddit states.

And Reddit hopes this kind of audience insight could prove lucrative. The company’s marketing team aims to analyse the “conversations taking place on platform and package them up for our advertising partners, to help pinpoint the most relevant communities to engage with,” Wong said.

“Our Australian user base is already strong,” she added. “This launch is about taking our presence in the region to the next level and ensuring the all-important local nuance, context and experience can be applied to our business as we continue to scale in the market.”

Reddit was founded in 2005 by Americans Alexis Ohanian, Steve Huffman, and Aaron Swartz. The company was sold to media powerhouse Condé Nast for $US10 million. Buoyed by the GameStop saga, the platform’s new import on the real-world financial realm, and a US$ 250 million funding round, Reddit’s valuation grew to US$6 billion in Feburary this year.

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