Over the past few weeks, Reddit has been transitioning over to a more user-friendly site with less text and simpler navigation. While many users are decrying the new look, complaining that Reddit’s culture will inherently change, it seems the controversial redesign is maybe doing better than the site’s veteran users would like to admit.
Reddit has now surpassed Facebook to become the third most popular site in the US according to the Alexa rankings, just pipped out by Google and YouTube. Fittingly, the ranking change was first spotted and posted on the site itself.
According to the list, visitors spend more time on Reddit than they do on any of the other sites listed in Alexa’s top five US rankings. Users on Reddit spend an average of 15 minutes and ten seconds on the site, while visitors to Facebook spend just under 11 minutes; Google, seven minutes; Amazon, seven-and-a-half minutes and YouTube, eight-and-a-half minutes.
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Globally, Reddit still sits in sixth place, behind Wikipedia, Baidu, Facebook, YouTube and Google. Still, while Reddit can take pride in being ranked so high, Alexa rankings aren’t all that accurate and it most definitely isn’t a science, as Alan noted in his piece on Bing’s weird uptake in usage.
Reddit announced three weeks ago that the company would be bringing the chatroom of yesteryear back to the fore in an effort to compete with the chat behemoth that is Discord. Currently, many Reddit subreddits have been flocking to Discord and creating their own dedicated chat servers. Reddit’s implementation of subreddit-focused chatrooms should keep users on the platform for even longer periods of time.
The self-titled “front page of the internet’s” rise comes as Facebook continues to face questions over its handling of personal data and watches as younger users leave the platform in droves. Whether the social network’s ranking will drop even lower, we’ll just have to see, but we’re pretty certain it will.
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