Social media and discourse platform Reddit plans to open offices in Sydney, Australia, benefitting the company and the thousands of users on its platform, Reddit's chief operating officer said.
Offices in Sydney mean more local resources and more local users, Reddit COO Jennifer L. "Jen" Wong told The Sydney Morning Herald shortly after the physical expansion plans were announced in early July.
"One of the benefits of having dedicated resources on the ground is that local users can build local communities and with local context," Wong said in the news story. "And as a result, what we can do is also serve local advertisers and bring them onto our ad platform."
Wong has been Reddit's COO since April 2019.
Australia is home to Reddit's fourth-largest user base, according to an AusDroid news story about the social media platform's Sydney expansion plans.
Reddit, physically headquartered in San Francisco, employs only a few hundred full time but its communities, or "subreddits," are managed by many thousands of volunteer moderators driven by knowledge and passion about a given topic, Wong told The Sydney Morning Herald.
"So you'll have people who will lead an infertility subreddit, and it's because they suffer from infertility and just want other people to get help," Wong said. "Or they're incredibly passionate about gardening and they want to see other people succeed, and get their vegetable garden to thrive."
Reddit denizens have a strong influence on each other’s purchasing decisions and also use the platform to have private discussions not for public consumption online, all of which is a source of unduplicated data that advertisers can harness.
"[Reddit] stands out in particular in the consideration phase, as people move through the path to purchase, because it’s so authentic and because it provides such valuable information," Wong told The Sydney Morning Herald. "We are a platform where users have control over their identity. And so, we have this interest graph that people expose because they’re spending time on Reddit in a different way [compared to other social media platforms]."
Reddit's new Sydney offices will manage local communities, moderation and sales, and the staff will include engineering and sales, AusDroid reported.
Reddit opened offices in the UK last year and in Canada earlier this year, according to AusDroid.