Reddit on Wednesday launched a set of free tools for publishers to track their article performance and receive suggestions on where to share their stories within the site’s communities. The new features are launching as a part of Reddit Pro, a suite of business tools it debuted last year to help organizations grow their presence on the platform.
There are three key tools being added under the Links tab in Reddit Pro. These include article insights to see where stories have been shared and stats related to them, including views, upvotes, and clicks.
Publishers can also sync their RSS feeds to Reddit Pro and then use the dashboards to share articles. For distribution, Reddit will use AI to suggest communities where articles could be shared.
Reddit said that it has been alpha testing the publisher product with publications like The Atlantic, The Hill, NBC News, and The Associated Press. The social platform is now inviting other platforms to try it out under beta.
The company is also improving the news-reading experience on the consumer side. Right now, when you click on a link, Reddit opens it through an in-app browser. If you want to post comments in the original thread, you have to close the story. The company is making it easier to open a link in such a way that you only have to swipe up to read or post comments.
News, articles, and blogs are an important part of people’s searching experience on Reddit. That’s why Reddit wants to make the platform more suited for publishers to distribute their stories, so people can find them while searching. That also ties into the company’s more recently declared ambition to become a search engine.
While Reddit is showing more stats to businesses, it is also changing some consumer-facing numbers. The company announced on Tuesday that it will stop showing member count on subsreddits, replacing them with a seven-day visitor figure, along with the number of contributions made in that time.