What Did Reddit's Quarter Change For Its Stock?

For questions about this article or underlying research, email help@trefis.com.

Reddit (RDDT) stock fell 29.2% on October 30, 2026, during the first trading session after its fiscal Q3 2026 report . The S&P 500 lost 1.8% on the same day. This marks a steep fall following a quarter where revenue of $895 million came in about 2% above what analysts had expected. So what did Reddit tell investors that its results did not?

Reddit Warned Of A Drop In Daily Users

During the October 29 call, management said daily users could fall by a low double-digit percentage in the fourth quarter from a current base of 130 million. The warning came from search. Traffic that search engines send to Reddit fell meaningfully in fiscal Q3 2026, and the decline sped up late in the quarter. In October, those referrals dropped by more than 1 million a week on average, and management's estimate for users assumes that pace continues.

The results themselves held no surprise of that size. Earnings per share came in at $1.40, above the $1.33 analysts expected. Reddit's peers fell far less on the same day. Meta Platforms fell 1.5% and Alphabet fell 1.4%, while Pinterest, the weakest of the three peers, fell 2.8%. The fall was Reddit's own, not its industry's.

Is Reddit's Slowdown More Than One Quarter?

It is for sales growth. Reddit's revenue grew 69.1% from a year earlier in fiscal Q1 2026, a shade below the 69.7% posted in fiscal Q4 2025. Growth then slowed to 61.1% in fiscal Q2 2026 and to 53.0% in fiscal Q3 2026. Management expects growth to slow again in fiscal Q4 2026, forecasting revenue of $1 billion to $1.03 billion, or 38% to 42% growth. News reports on October 30 said that outlook was lower than expected. The traffic warning is new, but the slower growth is not.

Profitability is another matter. Reddit reported an operating margin of 29.2% in fiscal Q3 2026, compared with 23.7% a year earlier.

Management argued that Reddit is still growing where it counts: engagement from its app and logged-in users. About 80% of Reddit's monetization happens within that group, management said. The company added that Reddit is still a top search term in Google, and that Google is simply not sending people to Reddit the way it used to.

When Will Reddit's User Count Be Known?

The fiscal Q4 2026 results will be Reddit's first report since the warning. During that quarter, management plans to begin fully testing a logged-in-only version of Reddit in select markets outside the U.S. The company said the change would likely trade reach for engagement, noting that it will keep evaluating how it reports users.