May 1 (Reuters) - Reddit ( RDDT ) shares jumped 16% in premarket trading on Friday after an upbeat quarterly revenue forecast underscored growing returns from the social media company's AI-driven advertising tools.

The company's AI-optimized ad platform helps advertisers place targeted ads directly within relevant discussion threads across its interest-based communities called subreddits.

The strong results signal that the company's strategy is paying off as Reddit ( RDDT ) takes on bigger ad rivals such as Meta's Instagram and Facebook.

Reddit ( RDDT ) is "still hiring and adding to our talent base," Chief Operating Officer Jen Wong told Reuters on Thursday.

The remarks paint Reddit ( RDDT ) as an outlier, as companies such as Meta, Snap and Pinterest ( PINS ) have cut thousands of jobs over the past year to streamline operations and refocus spending on artificial intelligence.

Reddit's ( RDDT ) stock has had a turbulent year, sliding roughly 36% year-to-date, while Snap and Pinterest ( PINS ) have dropped about 24% each.

Its daily active unique visitors grew 17% to 126.8 million in the quarter, while global average revenue per user increased by 44%.

"Execution across these areas (U.S. user growth) remains key to driving multiple expansion for Reddit...as it will showcase its growing importance, even in a future GenAI enabled and agentic landscape," said analysts at Morgan Stanley.

Its ad platform uses AI to improve campaign creation and management through features including an AI copywriter for Reddit ( RDDT )-specific advertisements and an automatic creative asset cropper that optimizes images for various ad placements.

Its vast content library has also become a prized asset as AI companies hunt for data to train their large language models, the technology behind chatbots such as ChatGPT.

Reddit ( RDDT ) has a 12-month forward price-to-earnings ratio of 30.40, compared with Snap's 9.93, Pinterest's ( PINS ) 10.27 and Meta's 19.05.

(Reporting by Joel Jose in Bengaluru)