What happened
In September 2022, Reddit acquired Spiketrap, an AI company specializing in audience contextualization and contextual advertising, for an undisclosed sum. Spiketrap's technology used artificial intelligence to analyze the context surrounding online conversations, helping brands, platforms, and agencies understand audiences and place advertising more intelligently. Its toolset spanned contextual audience analysis, brand intelligence, contextual advertising, influencer planning, and campaign-impact reporting.
For Reddit, the deal was squarely about strengthening its advertising business, the company's primary revenue engine as it moved toward a public listing. Contextual targeting — matching ads to the subject and tone of nearby content rather than to individual user tracking — was becoming increasingly important amid tightening privacy rules and the decline of third-party cookies. Spiketrap gave Reddit additional in-house AI talent and ad-tech capability to help advertisers reach the right communities while respecting user privacy. The acquisition came in the same year as Reddit's purchases of Spell and the Oterlu moderation team, underscoring how aggressively the company was buying machine-learning expertise in 2022.