Reddit Rises 6% as User Growth Hits Fastest Pace of the Year, Pinterest Ticks Up, Snap Barely Budges

Reddit (NYSE:RDDT | RDDT Price Prediction) stock is up 6% to $155.43 in mid-morning Thursday trading, leading the pure-play social names higher on fresh third-party research showing user growth accelerated to the fastest monthly pace of the year in August. The SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSEARCA:SPY) is down 0.4% on the day, so the move stands out against a broadly softer market. Coming into today, Reddit stock was down 33% year to date (YTD), so this pop lands after a punishing stretch that leaves the analyst average price target of $213.10 well above where the stock trades.

Today’s catalyst is a Piper Sandler note tracking Reddit’s audience trends outside the firm’s own disclosures, and it lands one day after prior coverage of this group focused on Pinterest‘s (NYSE:PINS) guidance-driven repricing and the resignation of its finance chief. That piece raised the question of whether Reddit and Snap (NYSE:SNAP) were about to be dragged into a sector-wide advertising reset alongside Pinterest, and today’s session resolves that question in the negative, with the pure-play social sleeve moving up as one.

User Growth Note Sparks the Rally

Piper Sandler said Reddit’s average user base grew 8% month on month in August, the platform’s fastest monthly growth rate of the year and a reversal from a decline the prior month. The same Piper Sandler note put overall audience up 18% year on year in August, accelerating from 12.8% growth in July. International users carried much of the load in the Piper Sandler data, growing 29.3% year on year versus 19% in July, so the reacceleration is being led by markets outside the home base.

This framing matters because Reddit management publicly targets 1 billion daily users globally and 100 million in the U.S. Reddit’s Q2 2026 report in July already showed advertising revenue of $762 million on 64% year-over-year growth, so today’s third-party read reinforces that the top of the funnel is cooperating with the ad engine underneath.

There’s a caveat worth flagging. Separately, Piper Sandler said Reddit is preparing changes to its ads manager model that are expected to produce a 20% reset to reported audience size. So the growth investors are rewarding today sits on a measurement basis that’s about to change, and the next quarterly disclosure will be the first chance to see whether the underlying trajectory survives the new denominator.

Peers Follow, Fund Fades

Wednesday’s open question about a sector-wide social ad reset gets answered in the negative today. Pinterest stock is up 2% to $18.67, recovering some ground after its own guidance-driven repricing earlier this week. Meanwhile, Snap stock is up 0.5% to $5.34, a slim gain that still keeps it aligned with the group.

The Global X Social Media ETF (NASDAQ:SOCL) is nevertheless down 0.2% on the day. That divergence reflects sleeve weight rather than any change in sentiment on the three pure-play names below, since SOCL’s construction leans heavily on the largest digital ad companies.

Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) sits at the top of the fund at 10.6% of net assets; Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) is the next-largest position at 9%. Together they anchor the SOCL ETF, so the fund is reading the megacap ad platforms rather than the smaller pure-plays rallying underneath it today.

What to Watch Next

Two threads carry the story forward from here. The ads manager audience reset that Piper Sandler flagged will re-baseline reported user counts on the same platform investors are rewarding today for user growth, and the optics of that shift could complicate the next quarterly disclosure. Position sizing on Reddit stock should account for the fact that the numbers underpinning today’s move are about to be measured on a different basis, which argues for building their exposure gradually rather than chasing a single-session pop.

Whether Pinterest and Snap hold their bounces into the close is the more immediate cue for the group, since a group-wide follow-through would confirm that Wednesday’s Pinterest selloff was name-specific rather than a warning shot for social advertising. The SOCL ETF’s exposure to Meta Platforms and Alphabet remains the tell for whether mega-cap ad spend picks up alongside the smaller platforms. Investors considering exposure to this group can look for signs that Reddit’s international momentum shows up in the next reported quarter rather than only in third-party trackers.

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