Reddit is taking a cue from TikTok to bring viral stories to life through video. On Thursday’s second-quarter earnings call, the company said it’s been working on a new “video Reddit” experience that would not only allow users to watch videos from the platform, but also listen to posts in the background.
CEO Steve Huffman told investors that the company already sees people consuming this type of content on other platforms.
He’s right — on TikTok, for instance, there are 19.6 million posts labeled with the hashtag #reddit and another 9.9 million labeled #redditstories. Many of these feature a text-to-speech narration of a viral story published on Reddit paired with an unrelated video, like gameplay footage or cooking content.
“There is an emerging content type elsewhere on the internet of, basically, podcasts where people read Reddit content,” Huffman explained on the call. “I think this version of, like, listened-to or spoken Reddit can be really engaging, as well,” he said. “So that would be almost a different format entirely.”
It’s not clear how these types of Reddit videos will be incorporated into Reddit’s main app, but Huffman teased that the company will have something available for testing “later this year.”
The news comes as mainstream social and entertainment apps experiment with adding TikTok-like video feeds to their products.
Last week, Facebook announced plans to begin testing later this year a reimagined experience that will put a subset of users into a full-screen video as soon as they open the app. Streaming apps like Netflix, Disney+, Peacock, and HBO Max have also added TikTok-like short video feeds in recent months. Amazon offers a short video feed for shopping inspiration. There’s even a short video feed on LinkedIn, of all places.
It’s the TikTok-ification of the web at scale.
In addition, the company touted the early success of video in comments, which launched in June. Reddit said the new feature already accounts for more than 10% of its video posts.
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