Third-party tracking from Piper Sandler showed Reddit's audience accelerating in August, with average users up 8% from July and international growth reaching 29.3% year over year. The stock gained more than 6% to $155.43, ending a four-session slide.
Reddit Inc. shares climbed more than 6% to $155.43 on Thursday after Piper Sandler data showed the platform's average users rose 8% month over month in August, the fastest monthly gain of 2026 and a reversal from a 2% decline in July.
The gain broke a four-session losing streak and came against a softer tape, with the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust down 0.4% on the day. Reddit had fallen 33% year to date before the session, leaving the analyst average price target of $213.10 well above where the stock trades.
Piper Sandler's read on Reddit Ads Manager data put total audience growth at 18% year over year in August, accelerating from 12.8% in July. International users did most of the work, growing 29.3% year over year versus 19% the prior month. U.S. users rose 5.2%, with growth in the domestic segment continuing to decelerate.
The composition of the increase matters as much as its size. Piper attributed the August gain primarily to Feed users, which added 79 million, while Conversation users declined by 1 million. The firm said weekly user momentum has held up since early July, driven largely by the International Feed.
The third-party estimates line up with Reddit's own second-quarter disclosure. International daily active uniques rose 28% year over year to 77.1 million, against 6% growth in U.S. DAUq to 53.2 million. Global DAUq rose 18% to 130.3 million, and weekly active uniques crossed 500 million for the first time, up 24% to 514.6 million.
Piper's August audience measures are third-party estimates and are not directly equivalent to Reddit's quarterly DAUq metric. The direction of travel, though, is the same one management has been reporting: growth is coming from outside the United States.
That is where the revenue question sits. Reddit's second-quarter revenue rose 61% year over year to $805 million, including an 84% increase in international revenue to $167 million. International is still the smaller pool, which means each point of international user growth carries more incremental ad inventory than a comparable U.S. gain — and more room for ARPU to build from a lower base.
Piper Sandler also raised its estimate for third-quarter advertising spending growth by 30 basis points, and lifted its estimate for Reddit's own third-quarter ad-spending growth by the same margin. August ad spending across the firm's digital advertising dataset ran 60 basis points above expectations, with Netflix, Roku, YouTube and Pinterest among the largest positive surprises.
The stock move also reflected a positioning unwind rather than fresh conviction. Coming into Thursday, Reddit had lost ground in four straight sessions, and the pop landed on a day when the broader market was lower. Pinterest rose 2% to $18.67 and Snap added 0.5% to $5.34, while the Global X Social Media ETF slipped 0.2% — a divergence that reflects the fund's heavy weighting toward Meta Platforms at 10.6% of net assets and Alphabet at 9%, not a split verdict on the smaller pure-plays.
Piper flagged that changes to Reddit's Ads Manager forecasting model are expected to reduce September audience-size estimates by about 20%. The firm described the shift as a one-time methodology reset rather than a deterioration in underlying user trends, and said it does not affect auctions, optimization or ad delivery.
The optics are the problem. The same measurement system investors rewarded on Thursday will re-baseline reported audience counts before the next quarterly disclosure, so a headline decline in September estimates could read as a growth stall even if the underlying trajectory holds. Reddit management targets 1 billion daily users globally and 100 million in the U.S.; the gap between those goals and the current 130.3 million global DAUq is the long-run case, and the September reset is the near-term noise that sits between them.
For the bull case to survive past this session, the international Feed momentum Piper tracked in August needs to show up in Reddit's own reported third-quarter numbers — both in DAUq and in the international revenue line that grew 84% last quarter. Until then, the move rests on third-party data measured on a basis that is about to change.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
