Video has been a big hit for Reddit: A little over a year after first launching native video hosting, the self-proclaimed front page of the internet already surpassed one billion video views per month. Reddit is also quickly approaching one million monthly video uploads every month, reaching 996,000 uploads in August.
Reddit officially launched native video uploads in August of 2017, and the company’s VP of product Alex Le told Variety this week that it had been part of a bigger overhaul for the company. “We’ve been modernizing our platform,” he said. Reddit’s recent redesign, as well as the introduction of chat rooms for Reddit communities, have been part of this effort as well, he explained.
Native video in particular has been a big hit for Reddit. The company revealed Tuesday that it now streams 400,000 hours of native video every single day, which equals over 13 million hours per month. Those numbers are up 38% since the beginning of the year.
Much of this video viewing is happening on mobile, where viewing activity has doubled since the beginning of the year. In August, 70% of all video viewing happened on mobile devices. And users who consume video on Reddit spend almost twice as much time on the service than those who don’t
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Le said that the growth in native video hasn’t been detrimental to videos hosted on other platforms like YouTube. “We are still seeing a lot of links being published,” he said, arguing that much of the native video viewing has been additive.
That’s in part because of the strength of the long tail, and the appeal video has to new Reddit users. Within the first three months of Reddit launching native video last year, close to half of the people who published videos on Reddit had never published anything on the service before.
Going forward, Reddit wants to make it even easier for Reddit users to discover videos in a dedicated environment, and also to continue to watch videos around a subject. However, the company still wants to keep users engaged, and have them take part in the discussions on the service — so don’t expect Reddit to launch a lean-back couch potato viewing mode any time soon. Said Le: “So much of what happens on Reddit is very lean-forward.”
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