2024 was the year Reddit made a play for social media’s organic sports crown

Reddit’s sports fan communities grew rapidly in the last year.

Perhaps no great surprise, given 2024’s bumper sporting schedule, which saw the Olympic Games, Copa America and Euro 2024 tournaments catch the attention of audiences. The platform recorded a 35% year-on-year increase in engagement in over 1,000 sports-themed Subreddits, according to internal data that didn’t outline specific figures, shared with Digiday.

But that growth isn’t accidental. For the last year, Reddit has been working behind the scenes with the biggest organizations in American sports, including the National Football League (NFL), National Basketball Association (NBA), Major League Baseball (MLB), Professional Golfers’ Association of America (PGA) and NASCAR.

Each of those organizations already had a foothold on Reddit. But, throughout 2024, the platform’s staff — led by senior director of media business development Sarah Rosen and head of sports partnerships Christine Wixted, who both joined the company in 2023 — have been advising their respective social teams on how best to connect with sports fans, as part of the Reddit Pro scheme, a product suite offering publishers and brands a dashboard, performance data and the ability to schedule posts in advance.

That’s aided the organic social media efforts of those leagues. And it’s another means of sharpening Reddit’s advertising proposition in a year when the social platform has sought to catch the eyes of brand marketers and media buyers.

Prior to its IPO in the first quarter, the platform stepped up its advertising efforts with initiatives such as agency days, new ad products, and a hiring push to increase its ad sales staff. There’s also been signals that the firm is readying the launch of its own search ads business. Reddit’s ad revenue reached $315.1 million in the third quarter, up 56% on the previous year.

Now it’s a public company, there’s more pressure than ever to prove its appeal to brands. 

Well, the larger and more engaged its user base of sports fans is, the more attractive the platform will be to them. Marketers are, after all, increasingly inclined to try and reach consumer audiences via their sporting allegiances.

According to Rosen, Reddit’s leg-up for the leagues ranged from advice on best practices for posting and community engagement, to connecting the leagues with Subreddit moderators to get feedback on what kinds of organic content might be popular.

“We’ve seen a real opportunity to reach audiences more directly on that platform,” said Cameron Gidari, vp social media and innovation at MLB. “We want to be seen as more accessible and have a more direct relationship with our fans. Reddit is a really good place for us to do that.”

The MLB were among the earliest users of Reddit Pro, beginning in 2023 during the program’s alpha phase. Gidari said his team focused on posting baseball content, including video footage from games and “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) posts with current and former players such as Ozzie Albies, Ryan Dempster and Jake Peavy. 

An internal Reddit survey of 750 users identifying as sports fans found 88% used the platform at least once a week; two third said usage had deepened their sports fandom, while half reported they watched more live sport because of their Reddit usage. Gidari, who called the approach “avid-first,” said the activity was aimed squarely at hardcore fans. 

The NBA’s use of the platform has followed along similar lines. To flag the upcoming NBA Cup, for example, the league staged an insiderish AMA with Evan Wasch, head of NBA basketball strategy and analytics, in which he discussed the format of the tournament. During 2024, the main /nba Subreddit has grown from 10 million subscribers to 14.1 million, noted Nathan Stoppelmann, the NBA’s senior director of new media deal management.

“We’re clearly tapping in [to] and helping to grow an audience that wants to hear from us,” said Stoppelmann. Both he and Gidari indicated their respective leagues would continue to develop their activity on the platform in 2025. “We’re constantly evaluating our strategy on the platform,” said Stoppelmann, who added the team had already begun focusing attention on individual team Subreddits, rather than only the /nba community.

Reddit isn’t the only social platform considered a destination for sports fans. The popularity of Elon Musk’s social media platform X among live sports viewers, for example, is one of the few reasons brand marketers cite for continuing organic brand activity. Gidari listed X alongside TikTok, YouTube and Instagram as an important channel to reach fans.

But sports fandom is “increasingly fragmenting,” according to Gabriel Noble, associate cultural insights director at We Are Social.

“X is still home to live sports conversations, but it’s losing its grip in owning this space due to an exodus of daily active users and a move toward becoming a pay-to-play platform,” he said.

In its place, he suggested sports fandom is migrating toward video platforms such as Twitch and YouTube (the Google-owned platform worked with Cristiano Ronaldo to help get his channel off the ground), or semi-private online spaces such as Discord servers, WhatsApp channels and Subreddits.

Rosen sidestepped the suggestion that Reddit’s sporting outreach aimed to disrupt its rival text-based social platform. She said the work was “less about what the other platforms are doing or not doing, or how they’re changing, and more about what we’re doing that’s working.”

Still, endemic sports brands have begun to take notice.

For Adidas, which staged its own AMA series this year with partner athletes such as WNBA’s Aliyah Boston and the NFL’s David Njoku, it’s becoming a useful channel to reach hardcore sports fans (the company didn’t respond to a request for comment).

A Reddit spokesperson declined to say whether it had recorded an increase in paid ad activity targeting specific communities.

But Alex Brown, head of sport and entertainment at EssenceMediacom, said the platform’s capacity for organic and paid activity represented an opportunity for brands. “The old world of being able to reach consumers and sports fans around linear is outdated,” he added.

2024 was the year Reddit made a play for social media’s organic sports crown

Reddit has been working with the NBA, MLB, NFL and other leagues behind the scenes to boost its sports communities.