Reddit's Collectible Avatars
3 Million New Wallets in the Last 3 Months
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Today we’re bringing you a conversation with the team that brought Reddit’s wildly successful collectible avatars program to life:
Daniel Conway: Product Manager, Avatar Collectibles Program
Conall Murray: Art Director, Reddit Creative Studio
Stephanie Quan: Go-to-Market Strategist for Marketplace
Having onboarded a jaw-dropping 13M+ new wallets into the space, Reddit is executing one of, if not the best web2 / web3 integrations, and their journey offers valuable lessons for other brands dipping their toes in the water.
Reddit has flipped the script on the NFT playbook by seamlessly integrating the blockchain into its long-established system of decentralized communities. In this paradigm shift, distributing millions of ownable avatars became a value-add for its community rather than the usual extractive ploy that we’ve become all too familiar with.
Check out the interview below, which has been edited for clarity and brevity. For more of our convo with the Reddit team, check out the full interview on our YouTube channel or in our podcast feeds.
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Carly: Connell, Daniel, Stephanie - Welcome to Overpriced JPEGs. One of the things that captured everybody's attention were the numbers of wallets being created for Reddit avatars. You seem to be onboarding millions of new wallets. When I looked today, it was at 13 million wallets and 3 million in the last two and a half months. So my first question is - Is that real?
Daniel: It's real. Getting onboarded to collectibles on Reddit doesn't have the prerequisite of understanding everything about crypto, wallets, and web3, like it might in other places. That makes it easier for us to onboard users and for users to understand the value of having a wallet and why it's needed for a collectible in the long term.
Carly: Talk me through that process of onboarding. Have people been proactively setting up a vault, which is what Reddit calls their wallet, or have you been giving vaults to active members?
Daniel: There's two main ways community members can get vaults. One is through purchasing a collectible avatar on the shop on Reddit. The other is through claiming a free avatar. In order to receive an avatar, you have to mint it and the user needs to create a wallet. So it’s kind of a two-pronged approach.
Carly: Taking it back even further, users could already have customizable identities on Reddit long before you implemented blockchain, do I have that right?
Daniel: Yeah, that's right. A couple years prior to launching collectible avatars, we introduced avatars on Reddit. Identity on Reddit is kind of an amorphous thing due to the varying types of content, how people engage, and the different types of communities. Avatars provided a way for everyone to identify on Reddit without doxxing themselves. So the concept of avatars on Reddit was not entirely new when we launched.
Stephanie: With Reddit being anonymous, we always wanted to find more ways for people to express themselves. People are being kind of their truer selves through that veiled anonymity and giving them a visual way to do it was kind of a core key experience.
Carly: Why create these as NFTs when you already had this avatar program that allowed people to express their individuality. What was the thinking behind adding the blockchain component?
Daniel: I think there's a lot of conviction at Reddit, from the top down, in the blockchain and the concepts of some sort of decentralized network and the idea that your identity can be interoperable, or that you can engage across platforms without needing to create new accounts, and really build that new status or reputation, or community on that new platform. So I think it's for the infrastructure layer. It's a different time in crypto now than it was a year ago, so there was other types of hype going into it, but there's a lot of conviction in the opportunity that blockchain can provide.
Carly: I love it. So let’s talk about this program. You launched collectible avatars with free claims and now you’re doing paid drops where you partner with artists, many of whom were in the Reddit community. Can you lay the groundwork on that?
Stephanie: It was a grand experiment, quite honestly. The larger Reddit team has always had an appetite to attract creators onto the platform. But Reddit is the most untraditional social media platform out there. It's a decentralized, community-led platform. Our users are anonymous. So how do you have a traditional “influencer” from Instagram make a big splash on a platform that is not individual based, but community based? So I think that this was an experiment, and it really was scratching that long itch that we've had as a company to get creators involved. And this was a perfect avenue to do it. We started with a cohort of about 30 artists for our first two generations, and we thought the best place to start was within our community. So we started finding people that were contributing in various art-based subreddits and kind of embarked on this journey and experiment together. And that's where we found Conall and we are so lucky that we did.
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Carly: To what extent is what Reddit’s done replicable to other companies, or are you like this unicorn because you’re already a community-based place with this avatar program and already had all of the groundwork laid to be able to incorporate this blockchain component without it being too jarring?
Stephanie: I believe in unicorns everywhere, but I do think our program is unique in that it really does represent the platform. We are a network of decentralized communities and we're kind of going into this decentralized system to implement this creator economy. So there's something very unique there, where even at the base level, it resonates with our audience and communities in that way, because there is that kind of inherent foundational connection, where people come to Reddit to be a little bit more radical. I think that has definitely played to our benefit, for sure.
Daniel: Yeah, we had some level of product-market fit with non-collectible avatars prior. Had we not launched that, we wouldn't have had that signal during a time where we could have gone in many directions with collectibles. That signal allowed us to move in a path that we felt made a lot of sense for Reddit, for the product, for users. Even the collectibles in the vaults we have today are a subset of overall avatar users on Reddit still. If you already have an avatar, you're more likely to become a collectible avatar user, if you already have a vault, then you may be more likely to purchase a collectible.
Carly: I'm curious, what you felt happened to the Reddit community once the crypto people came in, and where the community stands now, in terms of what the vibes are?
Conall: The initial collection was slow at first. Then our second collection was a free drop. Users could see a claim in their feed and most people didn't know they signed up for a vault, they just said, okay, cool, I have this collectible avatar. Then when people got more exposure to them, they went, hang on a second, there’s premium versions of these that people can buy. And I think it was probably after the creator program that people went nuts and the whole pool of crypto Twitter came in. And there was a very noticeable rejection of that by the people who were there originally. They were like, ‘Guys, this is not your regular old crypto project. This is a special place. This is a place where we're nice and we have avatars and we appreciate the art.’ And they just stayed true to it and kind of ignored the rabble, and they're like, ‘this crypto talk will pass and we’ll get good art.’ And for me as an artist, that's kind of lovely. '
Carly: Do you have a goal to onboard people deeper into the web3 universe from here? Do you think about how you can bring these users further into the long tail of web3 culture?
Daniel: I think the TLDR is where it makes sense, not just for the sake of blockchain and web3. Where it makes sense for users on Reddit, where we're providing value to them, where we're making it easier or integrating with ways to engage with communities on Reddit. And ultimately, we're trying to empower communities, empower creators, empower users to be self-sustaining in some way. And we see blockchain as a means to that, in many ways.
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Carly: Are you thinking about interoperability or partnerships where your avatar gets used in another app?
Daniel: Yeah, we are for sure and we're open to those. We want to make sure that it makes sense for users on Reddit. We have this core user base, we're not building from scratch. You know, there is a blank canvas in some ways for what we're doing. But there's also a lot that already exists with what Reddit is, what our communities are interested in and how they like to operate and interact and how users like to participate on Reddit. And so it's kind of where those concentric circles overlap or intersect.
Carly: Can you confirm whether you’re building a secondary marketplace?
Stephanie: That’s definitely one of the most frequently asked questions, but you know, the word marketplace means a lot of different things to different people. For some it means a secondary market - like an exchange - and for others, it’s just primary selling. So even within Reddit, we're trying to define our own version of that and whether or not that includes secondary sales is part of the conversation but it’s not something that is concrete.
Carly: This is an impossible question to guess at, but give us your sense. How much do you think the millions of people that have now been onboarded through Reddit understand and appreciate the full ownership and interoperability piece of what they have?
Stephanie: It's going to be something like your internet, your phone, your electricity, where it all kind of happens magically in some ways. And you're obviously the benefactor of it, but you don't know the inner workings, and that back-end technology that powers everything will eventually become standard. And I think that when the utility factor gets really up-and-running and people experience it in different ways, that's where it's gonna really take off.
Carly: I'm having this Aha! that's like an embarrassing Aha! to be having. Because this should be obvious, but why not just add the blockchain to the stuff you're already doing? Don’t make a whole new separate program, just put your existing stuff onchain.
Conall: At the moment, the bigger the entity, the braver you have to be to step into blockchain. If you say the word blockchain, people kind of look at you and go, ‘Okay, are you doing the same thing as everyone else? Are you doing this for money?’ But if people just kind of l get over that, people will realize that blockchain tech was developed for a very good reason - because it is a very reliable, incredible new piece of technology. Once people get over that, then people will just start using it for everything.
Daniel: I think there's been this prerequisite to educate people and then say, see, they understand blockchain and they still like it. But there's so many things we interact with that we don't understand, because it just works well. And we need to understand some components, you don't want to lose access to your vault or your wallet or whatever. But you also don't need to understand the inner workings of blockchain to participate and to reap the benefits and enjoy life on the internet using the chain. So I think we're moving more in that direction, where not everyone needs to be a crypto junkie to join the party.
Carly: Not to end us on any sort of sour note. But there were challenges with the third launch, it got pretty heavily botted and there were some technical issues. What did you all learn from that?
Daniel: We learned about building in the limelight.You know, bots are just still a thing for sneakers, for Ticketmaster, for everything. So we're learning how to mitigate and manage that for our use cases. We learned the hype is real, at least in that case it was. So we need to figure out how to manage that.
Carly: So what's coming next, any big highlights that you can share?
Stephanie: The biggest thing is that the fourth generation of the Creator program is coming soon. There’s always a lot of speculation around that. 😉
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