(Reuters) -Reddit ( RDDT ) forecast fourth-quarter revenue above Wall Street estimates on Thursday, thanks to its artificial intelligence-powered advertising tools that are boosting marketing spending on the social media platform.
The company's AI-optimized ad platform helps advertisers to place targeted ads directly within relevant discussion threads across its interest-based communities, known as subreddits.
Reddit's ( RDDT ) vast content library is one of its valuable assets at a time when AI companies are looking for data to train their large language modes, a technology behind chatbots such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Grok.
The company already licenses its data to Alphabet's Google and Microsoft-backed OpenAI. It sued Perplexity AI and other three data scraping companies last week, alleging them of illegally collecting Reddit's ( RDDT ) data.
"To continue its upward trajectory, the company must continue to protect its intellectual property - consumer conversations - from data scrapers," said Jeremy Goldman, senior director of briefings at Emarketer.
Shares of the company rose around 3% in volatile after-hours trading.
Reddit ( RDDT ) operates in a crowded social media market, where dominant platforms such as TikTok and Meta are aggressively vying for new advertisers with their massive user-bases and AI-powered ad tools. Facebook-parent Meta reported upbeat third-quarter revenue on Wednesday.
Reddit ( RDDT ) expects fourth-quarter revenue to be between $655 million and $665 million, compared with analysts' average estimate of $637.9 million, according to data compiled by LSEG.
The company forecast fourth-quarter adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization to be between $275 million and $285 million, compared with estimates of $258.8 million.
Daily active unique visitors rose 19% to 116 million in the third quarter ended September 30, while its average revenue per user increased by 41%. The company said its machine translation feature now supported 30 languages, helping fuel user growth across markets outside the United States.
Third-quarter revenue rose 68% to $585 million, beating estimates of $545.7 million.