Reddit earns revenue primarily from digital advertising, which made up about 95% of the company's $2.2 billion in FY2025 revenue (up 69% year over year), sold against communities built around specific topics and interests. The company's newer, faster-growing line is data licensing: because two decades of authentic, human-written conversation give AI companies valuable training data, Reddit signed licensing deals with Google (about $60 million a year) and OpenAI (about $70 million a year), with AI licensing overall making up roughly 10% of revenue -- a business that barely existed before 2024 and keeps compounding as more AI companies seek licensed conversational data rather than risk scraping it without permission. Reddit has supplemented organic growth with targeted acquisitions, including Alien Blue (2014) to build an official mobile app, Dubsmash (2020) for short-form video talent, and Spell (2022) for machine-learning infrastructure supporting recommendations, moderation, and ad targeting. Reddit's advertising business has historically lagged larger social platforms like Meta and Google in targeting sophistication, since Reddit's anonymous, pseudonymous user model limits the personal-data-driven ad targeting those competitors rely on -- a limitation the company has increasingly framed as a privacy advantage to advertisers wary of data-related regulatory and reputational risk. Reddits relatively modest historical revenue compared to its cultural influence and traffic scale has long been a point of investor skepticism, one the AI data-licensing business has begun to meaningfully address since 2024.