Oscylo’s forecast of Reddit’s Q3 2026

We expect Reddit to report 134.5M daily active uniques (DAUq) for the third quarter, up from 130.3M in Q2. Our 80% confidence interval is 129.9–139.2M. With US DAU rising 0.4% to 53.4M and INTL DAU reaching 81.1M. We also expect $959.5M in revenue (80% range $895.6M–$1,023.4M), against Reddit’s own guidance of $860–870 million.

Our forecast is level with the public consensus on US daily users and a little above it on international. On revenue we are well above: about 8% over the consensus of $886.4M.

When using machine learning to forecast, two things matter: not overfitting to the data, and having a baseline to beat.

For us, the baseline is Metronome. It is a forecasting model that predicts how Reddit will do on each metric if it keeps its current trajectory, meaning its recent rates of growth or decline. It is not a simple curve fit or assumed percentage growth rate. It predicts what we would expect if nothing abnormal happens during the quarter. Metronome is the baseline we compare all our results to.

We only accept a model that does two things: it beats this baseline, and its edge is unlikely to be luck. For the second, we check whether the improvement is bigger than what random, meaningless models can produce by chance. With the limited amount of calibration points (10 quarters) that check is admittedly weak, so it's currently only a filter, not proof.

Through our research, one model performed better than the others. It generates additional proprietary metrics and learns from them with machine learning, using a blend of features. We nicknamed it Pulse. It combines machine learning with traditional forecasting techniques. In selecting it, we built more than 30,000 candidate features from the data we collect, tested more than 145,000 model configurations, and checked the whole process against 2,200 simulated worlds. Almost everything failed to beat the baseline or prove to be more than random luck, but Pulse held up. It not only uses appropriate data sources, but the resulting relationships found through Pulse make intuitive sense and its p-value is 0.04. Unlike Metronome, Pulse can react to anomalies and divergence from the trend as they show up through external data sources within a given quarter.

Table 1 shows Reddit’s Q2 2026 results next to the Metronome forecast, the Pulse forecast and the public consensus. DAUq and WAUq are Reddit’s daily and weekly active uniques, as quarterly averages.

Pulse is a blend of four versions of the model, with various features turned on/off or weighted at different levels. The “model spread” shows the lowest and highest of the four. Next to it is our 80% range: we expect the actual result to land inside it about 4/5 times. Forecasts like these are noisy, and as a result the range is wide.

Table 1. Users are in millions; revenue is in US dollars. This page shows one decimal; the frozen record is scored at its two-decimal values (for example $959.45M for revenue). We do not set a range for ARPU. Metronome’s own 80% ranges are in the “Also on record” section. Consensus is Zacks, via Yahoo Finance, 26 October 2026. For US daily users, a chart of broker estimates posted online shows a Bloomberg consensus of 53.6M, which we could not check against a public source; the Zacks figure is 53.37M. For revenue, the mean of 26 analysts is $875.0M (Equibles, 20 October).

How fast each metric grows in our forecasts. QoQ is the change from Q2 2026, and YoY is the change from Q3 2025, using Reddit’s reported values from those periods.

Table 2. Q3 2025 actuals: DAUq 116.0M, WAUq 443.8M, revenue $585.0M, ARPU $5.04. Percentages are calculated from the frozen forecasts at their two-decimal values and rounded to one decimal.

US DAU appears flat (+0.4%) quarter over quarter. While an increase is still an increase, after a promising July and August we expected to be able to predict stronger US DAU growth. US DAU is one of the hardest metrics to predict, due to the difficulty of developing proper parameters and the granular detail required to get an accurate estimate. Metronome seems to expect US DAU will reach another ATH this quarter, but the ML-backed models temper that expectation towards returning to just below the previous ATH set in Q1.

Our internal parameters estimate that Q3 had an additional drop in users arriving from search, which was balanced by increased app downloads to keep US DAU close to Q1’s level. We are level with the public consensus (Zacks, 53.37M) and a little below the 53.6M Bloomberg figure that was claimed but unverified.

While the growth of DAU continues to be somewhat disappointing, metrics across Oscylo’s models indicate engagement is increasing on Reddit. The number of unique contributors per week, and comments per day reached an all-time high in Q3. These results and various other metrics indicate Reddit is becoming stickier as a product and a reversal from the downtrend in stickiness is possible.

As a side note: the current models are not fully equipped to handle the expected increased engagement and increased frequency of usage associated with users converting to the app, which is where Challenger1 (introduced below) is expected to shine in future quarters.

International growth continues. We expect 81.1M international daily users against 77.1M in Q2, up about 5% and in line with the growth seen over the last three quarters. This is bolstered by a marketing campaign Reddit conducted for r/sachintendulkar which brought in significant amounts of users to the subreddit, peaking at 18M in August. This traffic is expected to “juice” the INTL numbers for Q3 and an underprediction in this category wouldn’t be that surprising, especially considering this model has historically underpredicted in 7/10 quarters.

Revenue above the Street. Reddit has beaten the midpoint of its own revenue guidance in each of the last nine quarters, by 7.5% to 19%. Consensus assumes a beat of only 1% to 2.5% this time. We model Reddit’s revenue and expect it will continue the trend of beating its own guidance by roughly 11%. Pulse gave estimates ranging from 952M to 966M, with Metronome predicting 966M. The consensus appears to be discounting Reddit’s ability to continue growing revenue at its prior rate due to slowing growth in DAU. Our models disagree and we predict that revenue will be a positive surprise over consensus estimates, signaling that revenue can still grow amidst a slowdown of DAU growth.

Our worst revenue miss was -6.66% in Q2 2025 when Reddit beat by 19%, if Reddit’s ad engine can continue to accelerate and improve, another 19% beat would be about $1.03B in revenue. Moving forward, Oscylo is predicting over $1B in revenue for Q4 2026.

We tested the models on the ten past quarters from Q1 2024 to Q2 2026 (six for revenue, which has a shorter history), each time using only the data available up until just after that quarter ended. The 80% range shown comes from the method’s own misses in those tests.

Metronome is our baseline forecasting model.

Pulse beat Metronome on every user metric, but most of that edge came in 2024, a year of large swings in search traffic. In 2025 and 2026 the two are close. On revenue they are level (3.11% against 3.16%). Ten quarters, and six for revenue, is a short history, ranges are approximate and error levels remain high. As time goes on, these models (and others within the pipeline but without enough validation), should continue to improve as forecasting methods.

Metronome. It is very possible that there is simply not enough data yet to train a proper data-driven ML forecasting model for RDDT, or that there is too much noise to do this reliably. This might mean Metronome is truly the best model to use to predict Reddit’s results. For that reason, we are also freezing Metronome’s prediction so that it can be viewed and scored historically, in the case that ML is abandoned and a simpler forecasting model is further developed.

Metronome’s forecast was first frozen on 26 October 2026 as our headline, before a review of the models found a better one. It stays on record and is still scored. The table compares it with Pulse.

Pulse underpredicts compared to Metronome across every metric.

Challenger1. There exist several models which we believe have significant promise for the future, but are currently not yet proven to be reliable and validated. While we do not want to include these in our headline, it is worth mentioning them and recording their predictions in case over time they develop into the models we expect them to be. The most promising has been coined ‘Challenger1’, and is based on data found only on Oscylo. It is too early to be reliable, but in the future we think Challenger1 could become THE premier model for forecasting Reddit, or at minimum become a large part of the blend that makes up Pulse. Interestingly, Challenger1 disagrees with the conclusions of both Pulse and Metronome.

Challenger1’s forecast was frozen on 29 October 2026 at 02:56 UTC, as points only with no ranges, and it will be scored too.

We also forecast the logged-in / logged-out split of daily users. It is no longer reported, but we still model it for internal purposes.

Each record is a plain-text file, frozen before the report and posted in a public repository. Three independent checks show it did not change afterwards.

Pulse record (includes Metronome). Frozen 29 October 2026, 02:45 UTC.

Challenger1 record. Frozen 29 October 2026, 02:56 UTC.

Metronome’s original manifest, frozen on 26 October, has the SHA-256 58e6e21d6f4a49486fe540a215dcded491d2e81e24a6d5a07f8246e312d2aed9.

Check it yourself. Download the record file from the repository and compute its SHA-256 (on Windows, certutil -hashfile <file> SHA256; on Mac or Linux, shasum -a 256 <file>). It must match the hash above exactly. Then go to opentimestamps.org, drop in the .ots file and then the record. It should name a Bitcoin block (ours is 973636) and a time on 29 October 2026.

Both files were submitted for timestamping on 29 October 2026 at 02:58 UTC. Bitcoin then confirmed them, which fixes the time they existed by.

The confirmed proofs are in the repository’s third commit, “Q3 2026: complete OpenTimestamps proofs” (https://github.com/Oscylo-Analysis/Reddit-Earning-Predictions/commit/40202dd170c30ca6c8fd7f1bc941c317a1a477da). That commit changes only the two .ots files; the forecast records themselves are untouched. Both proofs anchor the records in Bitcoin block 973636, mined at 03:30 UTC on 29 October 2026, about 16 hours before Reddit reported.

Pulse and Metronome proof: https://github.com/Oscylo-Analysis/Reddit-Earning-Predictions/blob/40202dd170c30ca6c8fd7f1bc941c317a1a477da/2026-q3/oscylo-reddit-q3-2026-forecast.md.ots

Challenger1 proof: https://github.com/Oscylo-Analysis/Reddit-Earning-Predictions/blob/40202dd170c30ca6c8fd7f1bc941c317a1a477da/2026-q3/oscylo-reddit-q3-2026-challenger1.md.ots

Soon after Reddit reports, we will score every number above against its actuals, taken from its press release and shareholder letter as first published: the miss on each, whether it landed inside the 80% range, and how Pulse, Metronome and Challenger1 each did. Misses included.