Reddit wants more teen users. Can Snapchat help?

Reddit might be the “front page of the internet,” a hotbed of memes and viral videos, but the site’s not known for being particularly popular with teens.

The company wants to change that. So Reddit is launching a new integration with Snapchat, rolling out new sharing features that allow Reddit users to share posts directly to the Snapchat app.

While Snapchat has long let users share external links, the new integration with Reddit formats links into stickers that can be positioned anywhere on a given snap. When you send a snap with a Reddit post, the recipient simply swipes up, which redirects to the post in Reddit’s app. (The format will look familiar to anyone who has used the app Yolo, as it’s powered by the same developer tools that let other services plug into Snapchat.) 

For Reddit, the new feature is the first time the platform has adopted any kind of native social “share” functionality. Though content from Reddit often goes viral on other websites, this tends to happen because Reddit users post screenshots to other services, says Vaibhav Sahgal, the company’s head of growth product.

As a result, Snapchat’s most engaged users aren’t necessarily aware of Reddit, which launched in 2005. “We’ve seen that a lot of users on Snapchat are either not familiar with Reddit or don’t use it regularly — this is a really great opportunity for us to embrace that gap,” says Sahgal.

“These screenshots, you’ll find them all over the place. You find them on Twitter, on Instagram, they’re really popular on all of these social media platforms. This is a way to take a little bit more credit and have the source be Reddit when you view this on other platforms.”

For Snap, Reddit is the latest high-profile partner to take advantage of its SnapKit developer platform, which launched in June with a handful of services, including Tinder and Venmo. The developer tools have also inspired a wave of Snapchat-centric apps, like Yolo, which has ranked near the top of the App Store for months. 

Ben Schwerin, Snap’s VP of Partnerships, says the success of apps like Yolo proves just how valuable Snapchat can be for anyone looking to reach the app’s younger users.

“They see people sharing from their app who weren’t sharing before they had this integration,” Schwerin says, referring to app makers who have taken advantage of the company’s developer tools. “So this tells us that for Snapchatters specifically who are using other apps, this is a great tool that they weren’t using on any other service.”