Reddit Isn't an Affiliate Channel
And that's exactly why it works
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.
Source: Exploding Topics
ChatGPT was recently at 15%.
This creates a compounding effect that traditional marketing channels can't match. Your helpful comment on a subreddit doesn't just reach the few hundred people browsing that thread. It becomes training data for AI systems that millions of people query daily.
We're watching the early stages of a fundamental shift in how information discovery works. The brands figuring this out now are building advantages in how AI systems understand and recommend solutions in their categories.
Google is already all-in on this. Reddit results regularly rank first, second, or third for most queries. The algorithm has clearly decided that Reddit conversations contain signal that polished marketing content doesn't.
Note to our readers: New data this week showed ChatGPT’s references to Reddit dropped from almost 10 percent in August to just 2 percent in early October. The decline sent Reddit’s stock down more than 10 percent in a single day, raising questions about how dependent the platform has become on AI visibility. The stock has since held relatively steady.
This story is still developing in other news outlets like this one (The Tradeable).
We wrote this article before the ChatGPT news was released, and it is unclear to us whether that story indicates a market shift or just noise that we’ll forget about in 3 months.
With that said, we’ve keep our story unchanged as we believe the high-level messages and ideas are still relevant.
How To Build A Brand (and Revenue) on Reddit
The playbook has three layers, and they're all more labor-intensive than traditional affiliate partnerships:
First, build your own subreddit. Not as a promotional channel—as a genuine resource. Your best people (ideally founders or senior team members) need to staff it. The goal is to become genuinely useful first, a brand touchpoint second.
You need a comprehensive wiki. Sidebar resources. Active moderation that encourages open discussion, even when people mention competitors.
Second, build credibility at the user level. This is the guerrilla phase. Your founder or product experts participate authentically in relevant subreddits. They answer questions in r/personalfinance, r/debt, r/investing—wherever your ideal customers are seeking help.
The key is focusing on education, not promotion. Answer thoroughly. Demonstrate expertise. Only occasionally mention your product when genuinely relevant.
Over time, you build reputation. People recognize your username. You get permission to share resources. Community members seek out your perspective.
Third, optimize for search and AI discovery. Track which keywords your posts rank for. Focus on long-tail queries where you can realistically hit top three results. A detailed discussion with 50+ upvotes can easily rank #1 on Google for specific queries.
This creates a flywheel that feeds itself: Reddit posts rank → People discover your brand → Branded search increases → AI systems reference you more → The cycle amplifies.
The Uncomfortable Truth About ROI
Source: Backlinko
If you're getting 5-8% of traffic directly from Reddit, you're doing exceptionally well.
But that's not where the value shows up.
The real gains are in branded search volume climbing month-over-month. Direct traffic increases. Higher click-through rates on your paid search ads because prospects have seen you discussed positively. Improved conversion rates across channels because you're providing pre-conversion education.
One example: a branded search term that went from 500 monthly searches to 2,000 within a few months of consistent Reddit engagement.
That's not just traffic. That's mindshare coming from the trust built inside of Reddit.
But here's the uncomfortable part: you can't draw a clean attribution line from Reddit comment to conversion. Your performance marketing dashboards will undervalue this. Your media buyers will argue the budget should go to channels with clearer ROAS.
Why Most Brands (Who Are Great At Affiliate Marketing) Won't Do This
This requires a fundamentally different skillset than affiliate marketing. You're not optimizing commission structures. You're creating genuinely helpful content and building community trust.
The best person for this often isn't your affiliate manager at all. It's your founder, a senior product person, or someone who combines deep domain expertise with genuine empathy for customer problems.
You can't fake it. Reddit communities have highly calibrated BS detectors. Come in too promotional and you get downvoted or banned.
Most brands won't commit the resources. They'll try it for a month, see limited direct conversions, and move budget back to channels with cleaner attribution.
That’s precisely why it generates alpha for the brands that stick with it.
(Kinda like how helpful LinkedIn content from B2B founders builds brand and revenue for their businesses).
Tactical Note On Affiliate Links
Source: Lidl
Here’s our little PSA:
Direct affiliate links on Reddit remain controversial.
Rules vary by community.
Most successful operators focus on building brand presence and driving traffic to their owned subreddit rather than dropping affiliate links in comments.
Make sure you understand the specific rules of the community before dropping an affiliate link and messing up your reputation.
Who Should (and Shouldn’t) Invest In Reddit Communities
This works if your customers actively seek advice and community around the problem you solve. If you have team members with genuine expertise willing to engage authentically. If you're comfortable with longer attribution windows and indirect conversion paths.
It's particularly powerful for fintech, investing, personal finance, SaaS—any category where people research extensively before converting.
It doesn't work if you need immediate, directly attributable conversions to justify channel investment.
Closing Thoughts
The marketers figuring out Reddit now are building advantages that will compound as AI assistants grow. Every helpful comment written today could become reference material that LLMs may cite for years.
This isn't about gaming algorithms or finding arbitrage. It's about being genuinely useful where your customers already are.
That's always been the foundation of great marketing.
The question is whether your organization can execute strategies that don't fit neatly into traditional performance marketing dashboards.
Most can't or won’t.
The fact that’s its hard is actually good, assuming you want to take share from your competitors.
Reddit isn’t a shortcut or a new affiliate tactic.
It’s a return to something older and harder to fake: credibility. When your brand earns its place in real conversations, you raise your brand’s profile, which makes every other channel perform better.
And AI seems to be amplifying that.
Michael Hewitt (who sat this us and gave us the basis for the content in this article) runs MHH Ventures, a boutique consulting and growth partner that builds and scales affiliate & performance-marketing programs for leading consumer-finance platforms in investing, banking, and crypto.
Through hands-on affiliate management across 250+ partners, they’ve driven over $1 billion in deposits and $40 million+ in attributable revenue.
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Welcome to The Free Toaster! The newsletter for marketing pros at fintechs, banks, and lenders.
Inspired by the free toasters banks used to give to each new customer, we’re here to help you acquire more customers at scale. We deliver fresh news, data, and insights to help you acquire more customers, minus the breadcrumbs.
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