Reddit is surging in popularity—so much so that it’s surpassing other social media giants.
Reddit now has 330 million active users, and just higher than the number of active users on Twitter, according to data aggregated by Hootsuite. It’s also the world’s sixth most visited website, behind some heavy hitters: Google, YouTube, Facebook, Baidu, and Wikipedia round out the top five.
The site also reached another notable milestone. Data from Alexa suggests that Reddit is actually more engaging than porn. That is, users spend more time browsing the website than they do looking at porn.
“Visitors spend longer on Reddit.com than any other site in Alexa’s ranking of the 50 most-visited sites on the web, regardless of category—even compared to top ‘adult’ sites,” Simon Kemp wrote for The Next Web. That could be at least partially due to the fact that Reddit does house a number of pornographic subreddits itself. It’s also been a hotbed for fake celebrity porn, although such “deep fakes,” as they’re now referred to, have recently been banned.
Porn or no porn, Reddit users spend an average of 15:47 on the site each day, compared with just over 11 minutes on Facebook and 7:40 on Amazon. It’s beating out both major social sites, and general websites like Google and Wikipedia. (There is one caveat, though: These numbers are purely for time spent on these websites, and don’t factor in time spent on mobile apps.)
Reddit remains a vestige on the internet for those who value “free speech.” While a number of social networks have cracked down on violence and hate speech on their platforms, Reddit’s CEO recently—controversially—admitted that despite being frowned upon, racism is allowed on the site as long as language and behaviors don’t violate Reddit’s evolving policies. Other social media sites like Facebook have come under fire for appearing to favor liberal views and language over conservative ones.
Reddit’s monthly active users have increased more than 30 percent over the past six months, so it could be that those disillusioned or booted from Twitter or Facebook are turning to this site instead.
H/T The Next Web