--- title: "Reddit goes public, Baidu Tieba falls behind: Two 'second-tier' communities, after 20 years of ups and downs, their fates diverge greatly." type: "Topics" locale: "zh-HK" url: "https://longbridge.com/zh-HK/topics/32183905.md" description: "The "Matthew Effect" in the internet industry always repeats a similar script: the top players grab 80% of the industry's benefits, while the survival stories of the "second tier" are often more unique. This situation is strikingly similar both domestically and internationally. However, from an individual perspective, even though both are in the second tier, there are still differences in outcomes between the "American version of Zhihu" Reddit and Baidu Tieba. The former's nearly 20 years of deep cultivation and accumulation finally led to its listing on the Nasdaq main board in March 2024; the latter, as an important subsidiary of Baidu Group, has yet to be spun off independently..." datetime: "2025-07-24T11:07:52.000Z" locales: - [en](https://longbridge.com/en/topics/32183905.md) - [zh-CN](https://longbridge.com/zh-CN/topics/32183905.md) - [zh-HK](https://longbridge.com/zh-HK/topics/32183905.md) author: "[港股研究社](https://longbridge.com/zh-HK/profiles/3199113.md)" --- > 支持的語言: [English](https://longbridge.com/en/topics/32183905.md) | [简体中文](https://longbridge.com/zh-CN/topics/32183905.md) # Reddit goes public, Baidu Tieba falls behind: Two 'second-tier' communities, after 20 years of ups and downs, their fates diverge greatly. The 'Matthew Effect' in the internet industry always repeats a similar script: the leading players capture 80% of the industry's dividends, while the survival stories of the 'second tier' are often more unique. This situation is very similar both domestically and abroad. However, from an individual perspective, although both are in the second tier, the 'American version of Zhihu' Reddit and Baidu Tieba still have different outcomes. The former, after nearly 20 years of deep cultivation and accumulation, finally went public on the Nasdaq main board in March 2024; the latter, as an important sub-sector of Baidu Group, has not yet become independent and seems to be gradually fading in the wave of mobile internet. As AI technology reshapes the community ecosystem, why have these two community platforms in the 'second tier' taken completely different paths? Is it the inevitable result of genetic differences or the divergence of strategic choices? **One is an 'independent ecosystem,' the other is a 'traffic tool'** If we turn back time to the early 21st century, the birth of Baidu Tieba and Reddit is almost a footnote of the same era. The former was founded in 2003 and can be said to be the earlier 'world's largest Chinese community,' mainly relying on Baidu's search traffic advantage, quickly occupying the Chinese internet with the form of 'interest keywords + posting interaction.' By 2015, the platform had nearly 25 million daily active users and over 300 million monthly active users; The latter was established two years later, starting on campus, mainly attracting young groups with its 'decentralized' community governance and the core model of 'discussion groups on any topic' (Subreddit), and was even once called the 'front page of the internet' by the industry. Both are positioned as knowledge-based discussion-type interest communities, but the differences in their growth paths were laid from the beginning. Although Reddit started simply, it has always maintained its position as an 'independent company' during equity changes—acquired by Condé Nast in 2006, but separated from Condé Nast in 2011 to become a subsidiary of its parent company, Advanced Publications, and operated independently. It is reported that as early as 2022, when it commissioned Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs to promote its listing, its valuation had reached 15 billion US dollars. At that time, this 'independence' still allowed it to face traffic anxiety directly: early reliance on Reddit's 'viral spread' attribute for natural growth, but later, due to the impact of mobile products like Instagram and Snapchat, user growth slowed to single digits (only 7% in 2023). In contrast, Baidu Tieba's 'tool attribute' seems more prominent. As an important part of Baidu's 'search + content' ecosystem, Tieba's core mission seems to be to divert traffic for Baidu search—when users search for keywords, related Tieba will be displayed first; Baidu then enriches search results through Tieba's UGC content. This 'traffic tool' positioning allowed Baidu Tieba to enjoy traffic dividends when Baidu was at its peak, becoming the largest interest community in the Chinese internet within just three years of its launch. However, in the later stages, the drawbacks of not being operated as an independent ecosystem became apparent—the platform was not given the task of an independent commercialization loop: Early monetization relied on simple models like 'bar owner sharing' and 'brand zones.' During the mobile internet era, in pursuit of short-term profits, some vertical Tieba were even packaged and sold to corresponding advertisers, directly destroying the community's trust foundation, and the community atmosphere deteriorated; during the internet+ era, to support its own content ecosystem, such as launching Baijiahao, Baidu tilted Tieba's traffic towards mobile, but did not simultaneously invest in technology and operational resources to optimize content quality, ultimately falling into a 'less traffic, more chaos' death cycle. To this day, Baidu Tieba is still just a relatively long-lived and vital product under Baidu, not an independent enterprise; and the platform's user data is increasingly worrying: at the beginning of 2025, daily active users were only 8-9 million, and monthly active users were 30 million, far from the peak in 2015, with a high user attrition rate. **Through Reddit, see the fatal flaw of Tieba's decline** Each has its difficulties, but the underlying differences between the two have been gradually amplified since the mobile internet era. When new communities like Instagram and Snapchat emerged, Reddit relied on the resilience of 'topic aggregation + user autonomy' to stabilize its basic market; However, Baidu Tieba gradually lost its characteristics after 2016: short video platforms like Douyin and Kuaishou, knowledge payment platforms like Zhihu, and fan economy communities like Weibo respectively took away its entertainment, learning, and fan economy users. Tieba's content form remained in the 'text forum' stage, neither strengthening video like Bilibili nor deeply cultivating vertical fields like Xiaohongshu, resulting in a significant decline in user retention. More importantly, Reddit, with its independence, successfully completed the commercial loop after more than a decade of ups and downs. In 2019, Reddit officially entered the commercialization stage and applied for an IPO after achieving a revenue of 480 million US dollars in 2021. Later, the vitality brought by the AI explosion became its turning point. In 2023, Reddit reached a search cooperation with Google, which has 3 billion global traffic, and Reddit content was included in Google's priority index, with daily traffic visibly increasing; subsequently, Reddit introduced AI technology to empower translation, review, recommendation algorithms, and other processes, completing the optimization and upgrade of content ecosystem efficiency and quality control, and successfully activating the growth curve. The two winning moves quickly reflected in the platform's user growth. By Q2 2024, Reddit had over 365 million global users, and two years ago, this number was less than 209 million; after entering 2025, user growth continued to accelerate: Q1 DAU increased by 31% year-on-year to 108 million, WAU exceeded 400 million; the platform has over 100,000 active communities and 108+ million daily active independent visitors, becoming an important global information source and user-generated content hub. With user growth, the core key left is how to achieve profit realization? Data shows that thanks to the 'volume and price increase' of core advertising business, Reddit's revenue in Q1 2025 achieved a growth rate of over 60% for the third consecutive quarter, increasing by 61% year-on-year to 392 million US dollars. Behind this is the growth of advertising pricing, the increase in the number of advertisers in vertical industries, and the launch of new advertising platforms and technical optimizations driven by technology stack upgrades, leading to ROAS growth. Similarly, the main event of Baidu Tieba's commercial realization is also the advertising business. Unfortunately, it is too focused on short-term commercialization, ignoring the ecosystem itself. As part of Baidu's 'search + information flow' ecosystem, Tieba's core value is to divert traffic for Baidu and provide precise delivery scenarios for advertisers. This positioning leads to two fatal problems: First, the platform's content ecosystem is tied to the group's commercial framework. It is reported that the advertising density of Tieba increased from 5% in 2015 to 30% in 2024, with users seeing 3 ads for every 10 posts they browse, and the ads are too rampant and the content form too straightforward. Worse, the Tieba App also has built-in interfaces to divert traffic to other Baidu products like Du Xiaoman, further damaging the user experience. Second, the lack of independent operational resources—looking back at Baidu's strategic layout over the past decade—'Qunar,' 'Baidu Yi,' 'Baidu MALL,' 'Baidu Takeout,' 'Du Xiaoman,' 'Luobo Kuai Pao'... Baidu has always appeared in various trend fields, even once creating leading products in these niche fields, but the outcome is that most of them have left the stage in decline. For Baidu Tieba, Baidu's focus is too scattered, and the resources allocated to itself are very limited and not highly certain. Although Baidu attempted the 'Tieba APP Renewal Plan' in 2023, launching short video functions and introducing MCN institutions, due to the long-term lack of independent commercialization capabilities and the lack of content distribution incentive mechanisms, the proportion of top creators is less than 5%, the activity of small and medium-sized MCN institutions is low, user growth is not satisfactory, and the user payment rate is also less than 5%. The essence of Tieba's dilemma is that the content ecosystem is destroyed, content quality plummets, and there is a lot of advertising and spam; at the same time, there are too many shortcomings in community governance, leading to the proliferation of low-quality content on the platform. **Baidu is finally going to 'revive' Tieba: reducing ads, focusing on logic, can it bring users back?** The divergence between Reddit and Baidu Tieba is essentially the outcome of two models: 'user-led ecosystem' and 'platform-led tool.' In Reddit's ecosystem, 'user sovereignty' is the core logic: users can not only create sections but also participate in community governance through mechanisms like 'gold coin rewards' and 'moderator elections'; the platform's focus is to do a good job of 'infrastructure provision.' Guarding the ecosystem, once the traffic entry is resolved, it naturally explodes. However, it is important to be vigilant that although Reddit is still an independent entity, once it becomes a traffic realization channel for Google in its collaborative cooperation with Google, forgetting the importance of user trust, it may also follow in Tieba's footsteps. As for Baidu Tieba, when Baidu's daily visits were approached by Xiaohongshu to half the level in 2024, its strategic significance as the last bastion of the UGC (user-generated content) ecosystem was finally highlighted. It is reported that Baidu's Mobile Ecosystem Group (MEG) has made UGC one of its new work priorities, and internally began planning to reshape the UGC ecosystem. As a representative of Baidu's UGC ecosystem, Baidu Tieba will also have major actions in 2025—the strategic focus includes reducing ads, restructuring logic, and improving experience. But this revival is not easy. The first challenge is financial pressure, as reducing ads may lead to a 15%-20% reduction in annual revenue, and product restructuring requires at least an 18-month cycle; secondly, there is 'factional resource competition' within Tieba, and conservatives will be a resistance to change; in addition, for Tieba, its AI empowerment direction is still unclear, which is already a big step behind similar competitors. Therefore, to regain a new upgrade, the determination of the management and the full support of Baidu Group are indispensable. **The core proposition of the community: traffic realization is built on user trust** From Reddit's listing and Baidu Tieba's decline, we can see the underlying logic of the community economy: the real vitality of the community must balance the user's need for 'sense of belonging' and 'sense of participation' with the platform's pursuit of 'traffic' and 'realization.' Generally speaking, there is an ecosystem first, then advertising; trust first, then realization, and the platform can earn long-term money. The essence of the community is 'the connection of people.' ### 相關股票 - [Baidu (BIDU.US)](https://longbridge.com/zh-HK/quote/BIDU.US.md) - [BIDU-SWR (89888.HK)](https://longbridge.com/zh-HK/quote/89888.HK.md) - [BIDU-SW (09888.HK)](https://longbridge.com/zh-HK/quote/09888.HK.md) - [Reddit (RDDT.US)](https://longbridge.com/zh-HK/quote/RDDT.US.md) - [BIDU ADR US (K3SD.SG)](https://longbridge.com/zh-HK/quote/K3SD.SG.md)