$2.5bn a year: how Reddit could become the biggest affiliate EVER
Disclaimer: This is not financial advice. I am a Reddit shareholder / marketer with a predisposition for the company to do well.
For affiliate websites highly optimised for Google traffic, there is incredible wealth to be found in ‘comparison’ keywords.
These are users with transactional intent in the mid-to-bottom funnel, who know they want to buy something but haven’t quite decided which type, brand, make or model.
So these users might head to Google and search something like ‘best laptop 2025’.
Up until recently, you might have seen a publisher with a big brand name that you thought you could trust. A brand like Forbes for instance.
But Forbes were recently exposed for exploiting this practice and their comparison arm ‘Forbes Advisor’ wiped from Google after incurring a penalty. And they weren’t the only publisher hit.
So which site does Google now trust overwhelmingly for product comparison keywords? Reddit.
The product comparison opportunity
I happen to know a lot about this sector because I used to run a portfolio of product affiliate sites in the home and garden space.
Between 2021 – 2023 my sites drove more than £3m in revenue to Amazon UK, by referring organic traffic from Google (mostly around comparison queries like ‘best gloss paint’).
In 2023 Google changed its rules (and algorithm) and these sites were stripped of their traffic.
As difficult as the experience was for me at the time, it demonstrated the value in these ‘evaluation’ keywords – where users have expressed their impending intent to purchase a product, take out a new credit card, change energy companies etc.
In my opinion, comparison and evaluation is where the true commercial value of Reddit lies.
Google’s problem(s) with product comparison websites
To-date, publishers [and to some extent, Google themselves] have been the ones to exploit the product comparison opportunity.
However, there are some common problems which have recently become very apparent:
- Most large publishers are biased; incentivised to choose products or brands that offer the largest affiliate commissions – rather than those that will most benefit the user.
- It is incredibly time-intensive for publishers to procure, test and record the effectiveness of new products and services as they are released. Many will therefore review products or services without having actually tested them.
- Publishers will write content that quickly goes out of date, requiring extensive editorial expenditure to update articles with the latest products or services.
With Reddit, you have none of these problems.
Redditors are incredibly forthcoming with feedback, knowledge and insight for the products and services they use.
They’re not typically incentivised to promote one brand over another, so their recommendations are authentic and useful.
And when new products are released, Redditors use the platform to share their own personal experience as product enthusiasts.
These authentic experiences are far cry from most large publishers in 2025, where writers are often being paid to review a product or service where they have no real interest or passion.
And no – that observation doesn’t extend to all publishers. But it’s certainly the case for most of the content-at-scale digital publishers who exist in the current ecosystem.
How much have these publishers been making from product comparison?
Let’s look at a few notable brands from the affiliate space:
- Wirecutter (NY Times) – there aren’t any accurate earnings specifically for Wirecutter I could find online. However in their 2024 Q2 earnings report, the NY Times classed their Wirecutter affiliate earnings as ‘Other Revenues’ of $66m, including licencing deals. Based on the size of their current licencing deals, I think it’s safe to assume Wirecutter accounts for at least $50m of these quarterly earnings. And I believe annual earnings would be nearer $250m when you account for fourth quarter and holiday season spending.
- Forbes Advisor – Again it’s tricky to find accurate earnings. There’s a great piece here from Lars Lofgren where he estimates somewhere in the region of $236-400m per year. And Growjo reports $257m earnings per year. Of course these are numbers from before their Google penalty.
So it’s very questionable math, but we’re just trying to get a read on the estimated opportunity here.
It seems both sites (which had comparable levels of visibility until recently) earned in the ballpark region of $250m per year from their affiliate operations, which are almost entirely dependent on Google search traffic.
In terms of their Google visibility, I think it’s interesting to look at how much estimated traffic these sites receive from Google via keywords with product comparison intent. And for us then to compare this with Reddit.
A quick and easy way to do this is to look at how much traffic these sites received from keywords containing the word ‘best’. So for instance:
- ‘Best mattress’
- ‘Best coffee maker’
- ‘Best credit cards 2024’
- ‘Best comedy movies’
Some of these have commercial intent, while some (like ‘best karaoke songs’) are purely informational.
Let’s compare Reddit, Wirecutter and Forbes (in Oct 2024, before their penalty):
| Website | Estimated monthly Google traffic for ‘best’ keywords in USA |
|---|---|
| Nytimes.com/wirecutter/ | 4.3m |
| Forbes.com (Oct 2024) | 3.3m |
| Reddit.com | 42.6m |
And here’s Reddit’s unprecedented growth in Google for ‘best’ keywords charted over the last 18 months:
As an incredibly rough calculation, Reddit has 10x the amount of traffic for comparison keywords as two of the largest affiliate sites online, who were each earning roughly $250m revenue per year.
So my very questionable, back of a napkin calculations put the opportunity at:
$250m earnings x 10 = $2.5bn annually
And yes there are some huge assumptions there and even larger caveats, but I’m just trying to put a very rough number on the sizeable opportunity here.
And consider also that Reddit’s user generated content is free – so unlike publishers, there’s no expensive editorial overheads. The margins on this type of activity would be insanely profitable.
The Google factor
Forbes aren’t the only brand skirting the rules and exploiting product comparison keywords. And Google knows it.
Google have termed this ‘site reputation abuse’, updated their policies and stated that offending sites will receive a spam manual action (effectively, removal from Google search).
As well as Forbes, there have been other high-profile casualties in December 2024.
So to me it seems like the Google affiliate space will continue to be a difficult place for publishers to operate in.
Even more difficult when you consider publishers are employing editorial teams at a significant cost, to compete with the voluntary contributions of Redditors.
And while this dynamic continues, given Google has few viable alternatives to publishers in its organic search results, they don’t really have any other option than to continue to promote Reddit.
Personally, I think because of the number of users actively appending ‘Reddit’ to their search queries, Google now recognises Reddit as the user-generated alternative to publishers that its users appreciate.
So my own opinion is that Reddit will become a permanent feature for comparison keywords in search, but only if they work harder to clear these pages of spam.
How could Reddit monetise product comparisons?
Obviously the biggest barrier to entry for Reddit is that its pages are currently structured for conversations, rather than funnelling audiences to transactional pages.
And I don’t think they will want to change that too much given the damage it could cause to user experience and trust.
However, in launching updated Conversation Ads, Reddit have shown they are not afraid of monetising conversations on the platform.
Simple anchor text links with affiliate tracking could easily be added to forward users to popular retailers like Amazon.
Reddit could easily place links to retailers on conversations like these:
This technology has existed for some time and it would be a simple case of matching product or brand mentions on Reddit with a list of retailers and their products which were eligible for affiliate commissions.
And affiliate deals could easily be incorporated into Reddit’s conversation pages, especially with emerging technology from generative AI.
One feature of Perplexity’s new AI-powered Shopping Search that caught my eye was their approach to affiliates.
Search something like ‘best espresso maker under $150’ and their results pages will feature these product boxes utilising generative AI – which showcase product features and an expandable pop-out with further information.
And those ‘Visit Site’ links? They’re affiliate links generating affiliate commissions for Perplexity.
Reddit have a unique opportunity to implement something very similar on product comparison conversations, with:
- Products chosen based on the most popular products discussed in the thread
- Descriptions made up of comments and opinions in the thread summarised by generative AI
- Retailer pricing sourced and compared using retailer product feeds
These could even take up the same real estate on the page as the existing Conversation Ads, where I believe they would get much more engagement than existing ad placements.
Why am I being advertised a TV when I’m looking for a coffee machine?
From a user perspective, being able to shop relevant products which are trusted by Redditors (and for Reddit to source them at the best price available) would drive far more engagement than the poorly targeted ads which are shown at present.
And I know from experience that affiliate commissions of up to 10% will far exceed income from display ads. This could go a long way to accelerating Reddit’s ARPU (Average Revenue Per User).
Why haven’t they monetised product comparisons to date?
I’ve thought about this and I think it probably comes down to:
- User pushback – there is always a risk that if users believe Reddit is overly monetising their contributions, their conversations are no longer organic and can therefore no longer be trusted. Clearly, there is a careful balance to maintain here.
- Organic traffic – until recently, these pages never got all that much traffic from Google. However, traffic through product comparison keywords in the last 18 months has shot up by 2,300%. This is an emerging opportunity in the AI era.
- Technological advances – before generative AI, it would have been difficult to match the content of a conversation page with related products and then summarise those same products based on Redditor feedback. However that has now become a viable option.
I am sure that Reddit must be exploring the huge commercial opportunity from product comparison and affiliate marketing.
Won’t Google just cut Reddit out altogether?
Given their relentless pursuit of growth at all costs, at some point they will almost certainly try.
But they can’t change the fact that users want to see comparison perspectives from real people on Reddit.
Otherwise there wouldn’t be so many people (millions every month) searching for ‘best [product] reddit’.
Cutting out Reddit as the source of these human perspectives would be highly impractical and unethical, even by Google’s standards.
A note on spam
Google’s move towards promoting user-generated content across its search results will invariably lead to a lot of spam on Reddit. In fact, it already has.
Spammers will always focus their attention where audiences live.
The upvote system and moderators offer some level of protection against the worst offenders, though these can also be gamed.
This article from Glen Allsopp offers some insight into how much these Reddit threads are already being spammed.
This is a big deal because Redditors will only trust the products referenced in conversations as long as they believe them to be authentic.
So Reddit will need to closely guard against the proliferation of spam on its platform, or risk alienating both its users and Google.
I think my proposed solution would go some way in helping to do that – if spammers can no longer insert their own affiliate links into Reddit posts then we remove the incentive for them to post.
But clearly more will need to be done on this front.
