Jaeden Schafer

Both of those companies have spent years integrating shopping into social experiences.

Right.

Because influencers were talking about products.

And then, you know, we have TikTok shop where you can just buy directly on TikTok.

I think it is also coming at a time where there's kind of this bigger industry shift towards AI powered commerce.

Last September, OpenAI and ChatGPT, they introduced like an instant checkout feature that would let you go and buy things from Etsy or Shopify.

And you can make these purchases like inside of your ChatGPT conversation.

So I think for Reddit, there's obviously a huge opportunity, but I think it goes a lot further than just shopping features alone.

They had a whole earnings call and their CEO, who's Steve Huffman, he was kind of pointing to this AI search as, you know,

potentially a huge product and revenue driver for them.

Search usage is already growing a lot on their platform.

Weekly active users of Reddit grew 30% year over year.

It went from 60 million to 80 million.

And I think at the same time, the weekly active users of AI powered Reddit answers features were up from a million in the first quarter of 2025 to 15 million by the fourth quarter.

So

you know, they went from 1 million to 50 million, they're seeing massive growth in just that AI powered product.

A lot of executives over at Reddit right now, they're talking about how they're going to do a lot of M&A, some mergers and acquisitions, and how that's going to play a big role in expanding some of their AI capabilities.

So they're like, look, either we take your company, we plug it into Reddit's user base, and we grow you there, or you're literally just going to grow Reddit altogether.

So

He suggested that investors, you know, he's talking to all of their investors as a publicly traded company now.