Reddit

Reddit is a community where people can dive into anything through experiences built around their interests, hobbies, and passions. Reddit users submit, vote, comment, and predict on content, share stories, and have discussions about the topics they care about the most. From pets to parenting, skincare to stocks, there’s a community for everybody on Reddit and with more than 50 million daily active users across 100,000+ communities, it is home to the most open and authentic conversations on the internet.

Impact

Challenges

Reddit has always valued their users’ privacy and has never required an email address or a real name to create an account. While this is a valuable privacy quality for users, it has the potential to cause certain operational issues. For example, without a verified email address, there is no method for a user to recover their account if they forget their password.

Additionally, the standard registration process can have friction points that result in dropoff during user enrollment. For example, the pressure of having to create a seemingly clever username on the spot results in an approximate 30% dropoff rate.

Integration

It took approximately four months of backend engineering work to set up the system to support Google Identity Services. In parallel, Reddit also developed the frontend feature on the desktop platform. Mobile web, Android and iOS platforms all took approximately one to two months each to implement, as Reddit had to refactor most of the authentication and signup flows.

Reddit took an incremental approach to validate the opportunity by confirming the underlying technology first for the Sign in with Google button on a single platform, then expanded the feature on all supported platforms, and eventually investing in the One Tap module. End-to-end, it took Reddit about a year of planning, coordination, and launch support to roll the feature out to all users.

Solution and Results

Reddit chose Google Identity Services because of its trusted privacy commitments, never using signed in user data other than for the authentication moment, well-documented processes, and wide adoption across the industry.

Reddit effectively leveraged Sign in with Google to reduce the registration and login friction for new users by providing a method that easily validates credentials. Furthermore, the new One Tap feature reminds users to log in when they are logged out, helping Reddit maintain user preferences and personalized settings—an added bonus.

Since integrating Google Identity Services on Reddit, Sign in with Google has increased overall user sign ups by 50%, while One Tap increased sign ups by another 90%, resulting in a combined 185% increase in platform conversion. While Sign in with Google was the foundational product, One Tap was the critical feature that made it a much more streamlined process for users to sign up and sign in to Reddit.

Sign in with Google not only made the signup process on Reddit easier, but it also allowed users to secure their accounts in a new way. Additionally, every Sign in with Google account comes with a verified user email, which mitigates pain points for lost unverified accounts. With improved email coverage, Reddit also now has another dependable channel for communicating with users about their accounts.