Reddit says its ads returned an average $8.58 ROAS for tested gaming advertisers.
A Reddit-commissioned TransUnion analysis of gaming marketing mix models puts Reddit’s average return on ad spend at $8.58 for tested advertisers.
Reddit says its ads drove an average $8.58 return on ad spend for the gaming advertisers tested in a meta-analysis of marketing mix models, in a Reddit for Business post dated 3 November 2026.
Reddit commissioned the analysis and TransUnion conducted it. It covers January 2023 to December 2025 and uses blinded marketing mix models from the gaming industry that included Reddit alongside other digital and traditional channels. The post does not say how many models or advertisers were in the sample.
Across the study, Reddit delivered 12% higher returns than paid social in aggregate and 25% higher returns than the average media plan, while making up 5% of paid social spend on average. Reddit also says its share of gaming advertisers’ wallet grew by 46% since 2023, while the share of other paid social channels fell by 8% over the same period.
Where the return came from
TransUnion found that 83% of Reddit’s impact came directly from the platform and 17% showed up as a halo effect across other channels. Of Reddit’s total alignment, TV accounted for 18%, paid search 17%, online video 15% and paid social 12%.
In its modelled optimisation, TransUnion estimated that gaming brands were underinvested on Reddit by 134% on average during the tested period. Running a full funnel strategy across key campaign objectives was associated with 19% stronger overall ROAS than the single tactic average, and video views delivered the strongest ROAS of the objectives analysed.
The audience figures
The post adds three audience numbers, each from a different source. Reddit counts more than 1,300 gaming communities, from its internal global data for February 2025. A GWI US dataset on Reddit gamers is cited for the figure that 32% of US gamers on Reddit are not on TikTok; the post gives no date for that dataset. A Reddit custom survey of 3,000 US adults aged 18 to 60, run in November 2024, is cited for the figure that 71% of US Reddit gamers have bought a gaming product based on information they found on Reddit.
What it means for brands
For a games publisher or a gaming brand, these are the numbers a boss or a client will forward. When they do, the useful answer is what the study is: commissioned by Reddit, an average across blinded gaming models from 2023 to 2025, with no sample size published, and a platform that made up 5% of paid social spend in those models. The purchase figure is a separate survey of US adults from November 2024, so quote it with that source rather than as part of the ROAS finding.
This week, list the subreddits where your titles are discussed and read the last month of threads about them, so your team knows what players are telling each other before anyone asks what Reddit is worth to you.
Sources
The NBK Social briefing
Our Reddit coverage, and everything else we publish, by email.