A platform can run out of new humans before it runs out of revenue targets.
That is when revenue per user becomes interesting.
Public companies routinely measure how effectively an existing audience is being monetized. The metric is not sinister. It is useful accounting.
It also creates a very clear incentive:
If the audience is already large, growth can come from earning more from each person already there.
Reddit says this part out loud because investors need the numbers
Reddit defines average revenue per unique, or ARPU, as quarterly revenue divided by average daily active uniques in a geography. In its 2025 annual report, Reddit described multiple levers for expanding monetization and ARPU, including advertising products, advertiser growth, and other revenue opportunities. See Reddit’s 2025 Form 10-K.
The numbers moved substantially.
For the fourth quarter of 2025, Reddit reported global ARPU of $5.98, up 42% from $4.21 a year earlier. Daily active uniques rose 19% over the same period. See Reddit’s Q4 and full-year 2025 results.
That is not evidence that Reddit became worse.
It is evidence that the company became much better at producing revenue from the audience.
Those are different claims.
Monetization pressure can translate into product pressure
A platform trying to increase revenue per user has several obvious options:
- show more advertising inventory,
- improve ad targeting or pricing,
- add premium subscriptions,
- move features into paid tiers,
- sell promoted placement,
- license data or content,
- charge businesses for tools,
- increase marketplace commissions.
Some of those changes can improve the product.
A successful subscription may fund better moderation or infrastructure. Better ad tools can reduce irrelevant advertising. Business products can subsidize free users.
The problem appears when the revenue objective begins consuming more user value than the platform creates in return.
The metric does not prove the motive of every feature
This is where Enshittification analysis needs discipline.
If a company reports rising ARPU and later adds a disliked feature, that does not automatically prove the feature was ordered by investors to squeeze users.
Stronger evidence comes from investor materials that explicitly connect monetization goals to product strategy, followed by documented changes in pricing, ad inventory, fees, or paid access.
Reddit’s filings are useful because the company itself discusses monetization and ARPU as strategic objectives.
The larger mechanism is not unique to Reddit.
A platform’s early question is often:
How do we get everybody here?
Once the answer is sufficiently successful, the financial question naturally becomes:
How much can this audience produce?
That second question is where the user’s experience and the investor’s spreadsheet begin sharing the same screen.