Reddit (RDDT)

The sleeper story isn't the search traffic headline everyone will write about tonight; it's that Reddit quietly abandoned its own '1 billion DAU / 100 million US DAU' North Star in the same quarter it reversed a disclosure commitment and guided a core user metric down for the first time ever. The obvious headline, 53% growth beating a 47-49% guide, is real, but it's backward-looking: the forward guide of just 38-42% for Q4 tells you management already knows the referral bleed is structural, not seasonal. The binding constraint is Google, not Reddit's sales engine or product roadmap, and management says so plainly: 'We don't control Google. We only control Reddit'. Watch the quiet stuff: FCF replaced OCF in the script, revenue-per-employee disappeared, and WAU went unstated, all denominators that would have looked worse this quarter. My view changes if Q4 actual DAUQ comes in better than the guided low-double-digit decline, or if management reinstates an explicit operating cash flow figure and restates a concrete 1B DAU timeline next call; until then, this reads as a beat wrapped around a developing distribution problem.