Reddit acquires audience contextualization platform Spiketrap

Reddit announced that it has acquired California-based audience intelligence and contextual advertising platform Spiketrap. While the company didn’t share the financial details, it said the acquisition will help them advance the performance and relevancy of Reddit ads. 

Founded in 2016 by Adam Sessler, Andrea Vattani, Kieran Seán Fitzpatrick and Virgilio Pigliucci, Spiketrap’s contextualization platform aims to help its customers better understand their audiences, by providing them with various solutions including influencer insights, contextual ad targeting, ad measurement, and more. 

As part of the acquisition, Spiketrap’s team has joined Reddit and will help them lead a variety of advertising projects.  

Spiketrap’s Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder Kieran Fitzpatric said: “Our goal has always been to contextualize language at scale and in realtime to help creators, brands, and platforms genuinely understand and meaningfully engage their audiences. We’re looking forward to scaling these efforts even further as part of Reddit.“

The news follows Reddit’s recent acquisitions of machine learning platform Spell and Natural Language Processing (NLP) company MeaningCloud, in an effort to show users more relevant content. Back in 2020, the company also acquired video sharing platform Dubsmash to integrate its video technologies to its own platform.  

Shariq Rizvi, Reddit’s Executive Vice President of Monetization, commented about the latest acquisition: “The richness of conversation within our 100,000+ active communities is what makes Reddit so unique and so valuable for advertisers. We believe targeting relevant audiences based on interests and with the context of the conversations they are engaging in helps ensure advertisers are reaching the right people in the most efficient ways. We have been actively investing in solutions to this end for some time and this acquisition will round out Reddit’s capability, taking it to the next level. I am thrilled to welcome the Spiketrap team to the Reddit family.”