Reddit Inks Pro Sports Deal to Draw in More Ad Revenue

Looking to boost ad revenue, Reddit has signed deals with several pro sports leagues.

The social media platform announced Monday (July 22) it had struck agreements with the NFL, MBA, Major League Baseball, NASCAR and the PGA Tournament to expand its sports content.

“We believe these new partnerships can enhance our community experience with content that fans want while enabling advertisers to align with expanded fan content on Reddit,” the company wrote on its blog.

“Through our official partnerships with the NFL, NBA, MLB, PGA TOUR, and NASCAR, redditors will gain access to video highlights from games and tournaments, player AMAs, behind-the-scenes videos, and more special content posted by the leagues throughout their seasons and including during major events like Super Bowl and NBA All-Star.”

The company says the professional sports leagues are among its most engaged Reddit Pro users, with sports one of its most popular and fastest-growing interest groups — up 26% year over year — with more than 1,000 communities.

Reddit says its advertisers can align their brands to these communities and the content within them, similar to what companies such as FanDuel, Samsung, Ford, and Volkswagen did when the company conducted a test with the NFL during the 2023-24 season.

“During the test, an alcoholic beverage brand saw a +11.3 point lift in purchase intent, a +9.4 point lift in brand favorability, and a 5.9 point lift in awareness by activating alongside premium video content from the NFL,” the company said.

Reddit, which went public in March, has been in partnership mode of late. The platform signed a deal in May with OpenAI that lets that company use Reddit content to train its artificial intelligence (AI) models, while OpenAI becomes a Reddit advertiser.

In this collaboration, OpenAI will bring Reddit content to ChatGPT and new products by accessing Reddit’s Data API, which provides real-time, structured and unique content from the social media platform, the company wrote on its blog.

Another aspect of the partnership involves Reddit building on OpenAI’s platform of AI models to bring new AI-powered features to its users and moderators.

“Reddit has become one of the Internet’s largest open archives of authentic, relevant and always up to date human conversations about anything and everything,” Steve Huffman, co-founder and CEO of Reddit, said in the blog post. “Including it in ChatGPT upholds our belief in a connected internet, helps people find more of what they’re looking for, and helps new audiences find community on Reddit.”