Reddit and AppLovin, the Young Turks of Digital Advertising

Oh, to be young again. That must be what folks at Google and Meta Platforms think when they look at the two digital-ad rocket ships of the past 12 months, AppLovin and Reddit. (Sure, Reddit is 20 years old, but it’s relatively new to the ad market.) That youth is demonstrated by how much their businesses, and their stocks, exploded last year.

We got a taste of that on Wednesday, when both companies reported surging fourth-quarter revenues: Reddit’s top line expanded 71% in the quarter, with its ad business growing 60%. AppLovin—which sells ads that run within games and some apps—reported 73% growth in its ad revenue, although a dip in another part of its business diluted its top-line expansion. Of course, while they’re both growing at many times the rate of the big companies, they’re also a fraction of those businesses’ size.