Reddit Isn't an Affiliate Channel

I’d like to tell you about a conversation I had last week that reframed how I think about Reddit in the context of an overall distribution strategy.

Michael Hewitt, a performance marketer and founder of MHH Ventures, walked me through how his fintech clients are building acquisition engines on Reddit. Not through affiliate links or paid placements, but through something that sounds too simple: actually helping people.

Here's the part that made me sit up: it's working for fintech brands he advises. And the rise of LLMs is about to make it exponentially more important.

The Problem with Calling This Affiliate Marketing

Let's be clear about what this isn't. You're not negotiating rev shares. You're not signing insertion orders. You can't turn on a switch and watch conversions flow in.

In fact, if you approach Reddit like a traditional affiliate channel, you'll probably get banned.

What's actually happening is more interesting. Brands are building credibility in communities where their ideal customers already congregate. They're answering questions. Providing education. Being genuinely useful.

The attribution is messy. The conversion paths are indirect. CFOs will hate trying to put this in a spreadsheet.

But the brands doing this are seeing branded search queries double or triple. Direct traffic climbing steadily. Conversion rates improving across their paid channels.

It's the kind of thing that makes traditional performance marketers uncomfortable because it doesn't fit neatly into their dashboards (which is probably why it still works).

LLMs Lean on Reddit For Content

Here's where this gets interesting: Perplexity AI sources 49% of its references from Reddit.

Read that again. When someone asks an AI assistant about managing debt or choosing a credit card, roughly half the time the answer is being pulled from Reddit conversations.