Your brand can become a part of these communities by offering exclusive content, product samples or hosting an Ask Me Anything (AMA). The pandemic triggered Reddit’s extraordinary growth, which directly led to its recent IPO. Reddit’s annual revenue was $188M in 2020 and skyrocketed to $456M just a year later in 2021. In 2023, Reddit’s revenue was $810M and has 1.2B monthly active users.

Medium and Substack

While part of staving off loneliness is feeling like a part of a community engaging with like-minded people and sharing content, sometimes the desire to share an opinion requires more than a simple social post or comment in a thread.

Sharing long-form perspectives with people on platforms like Medium and Stubstack gives the creator access to an opt-in audience and also enables them to make a little money doing it. At the start of 2019, Medium had 400,000 subscribers who paid to access content on the app and that number increased to 700,000 just two years later in 2021. Substack, a similar type of platform where people pay to access content written by other people, saw site traffic grow by 42% from August 2023 to January 2024.

For brands out there looking for an early mover advantage with their media dollars, try investing in some of these platforms that are in high growth mode. To make the most of these platforms, keep in mind the mindset of these audiences and support their quest for more meaningful connections. Do these platforms offer the scale of other more established media channels? No. But they might in the future. Get in now, do some good and generate some key learnings for your brand.