On “the Most Real Place on the Internet,” Upvotes Cost 2 Cents

BySarah Fraser
A hand holding a smartphone with a social media feed glowing on the screen

Reddit made $847 million of its $895 million revenue last quarter from ads sold beside posts it calls human conversation. It also licenses those posts to Google for a reported $60 million a year, and the people who wrote them see none of that money. Reddit asks an account to prove a person is behind it only when it already suspects there isn’t one. At $0.02 an upvote, lifting a planted post into the range chatbots quote costs about 40 cents.

A brand that wants its product recommended can buy an old account and a handful of votes, post something that reads like a satisfied customer, and wait for ChatGPT to repeat it to you as what “people on Reddit” say. Reddit’s sign-up prompt calls the site “the most real place on the internet”. Novaknown’s reading of the record is that a significant share of what you read there is probably not written by the person it claims to be, and Reddit earns from all of it, real or fake.

1,783 AI comments, and nobody caught them

The clearest test of whether Reddit can tell people from machines was run without its permission. Researchers at the University of Zurich put AI personas on r/changemyview, a debate forum where a poster awards a “delta” to any reply that changes their mind. Over about four months the bots posted 1,783 comments and won 137 deltas.

Some bots tailored each reply to the person they were answering. A second language model read that person’s posting history and guessed their gender, age, ethnicity, location and politics. The tailored replies changed minds 18% of the time and the generic ones 17%. Human commenters on the forum manage about 3%.

The personas claimed lives that never existed: a rape victim, a Black man opposed to Black Lives Matter, someone who “work[s] at a domestic violence shelter”. One account, flippitjiBBer, wrote:

“I’m a male survivor of (willing to call it) statutory rape. When the legal lines of consent are breached but there’s still that weird gray area of ‘did I want it?’ I was 15, and this was over two decades ago before reporting laws were what they are today.”

A person reading an online debate thread on a smartphone

The people the bots argued with reportedly didn’t notice. The researchers told the subreddit’s moderators only after they had finished collecting data. Reddit’s chief legal officer, Ben Lee, called the experiment “deeply wrong on both a moral and legal level”, and the company sent the researchers formal legal demands (The Decoder has the details).

Reddit introduced human verification for accounts it already suspects of being bots on 25 March 2026. An account gets flagged by its activity or by technical signals such as how fast it posts. Flagged accounts can prove themselves with a passkey, Face ID, World ID, or a government ID where the law requires one (the UK, Australia and some US states). Accounts Reddit doesn’t flag are never asked. Using AI to write your posts does not break Reddit’s rules.

“Our aim is to confirm there is a person behind the account, not who that person is.”, Steve Huffman, Reddit CEO, to TechCrunch

The Zurich accounts would have passed that check. Each had a researcher behind it, writing with AI, which Reddit’s rules allow.

The same report put Reddit’s removals at about 100,000 accounts a day. Those are the accounts that got caught. For four months the Zurich bots, persuading people at six times the human rate, were not among them.

Outside investigators found the bigger operations, and Reddit banned them afterwards. In 2019, a Russian operation known as Secondary Infektion seeded a leaked 451-page dossier on UK-US trade talks on Reddit. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn then used it in the election campaign. Reddit banned 61 accounts and a subreddit on 6 December, acting on information from Graphika, a social-media research firm.

The record has one exception. When Reddit banned 944 accounts tied to Russia’s Internet Research Agency in 2018, it said its routine moderation had already removed 145 of the 282 accounts that had earned any karma, before its investigation began. Nothing comparable has been reported since.

In October, X suspended more than 13,000 accounts in networks tied to Iran, Russia and China ahead of the US midterms. Novaknown found no reported Reddit takedown of an influence operation between 2024 and 2026. The midterms vote on 3 November, and Reddit has disclosed none.

Upvotes at $0.02, accounts from 9 cents

The sellers describe their products plainly. UpvoteMax’s homepage is titled “Buy Reddit Upvotes from $0.02 – Fast, Real Accounts”. Its votes come from accounts “6+ months old with existing karma”. They arrive at a default pace of 50 an hour so the rise looks natural, and buyers pay in crypto. Its downvotes, at $0.01, are pitched for pushing down “a competing post”. AccsMarket’s Reddit catalogue is titled “Reddit Accounts For Sale From 3 Cents!”. It shows hundreds of accounts in stock per listing and sells them for “promoting content”.

What it cost on 2 November 2026 Price
Upvote on a post or comment (UpvoteMax) $0.02
Custom comment “posted from aged accounts” (UpvoteMax) $0.20
Post from an account with 500+ karma, 2+ months old (UpvoteMax) $15
New Reddit account (AccsMarket) $0.093
Account registered in 2022 (AccsMarket) $0.555

That is the same bargain bin as what a fake account costs elsewhere. On 15 October, a phone number that passes TikTok’s sign-up check cost under a cent, and one for X cost 31 cents.

Prices that low measure supply. Nobody sells accounts for nine cents unless there are plenty to sell. AccsMarket lists hundreds in stock per listing, and its shelves are full while Reddit, by its own count, removes about 100,000 accounts a day. Something this cheap is not rare, and the accounts that get caught are the floor, not the total.

The trade is not new. In 2017, Forbes journalist Jay McGregor paid an agency $200 to push a fake story to the top of influential subreddits. Another agency offered “unlimited conversation and vote manipulation” for about $1,300 a month and pitched “damage control” for a film company.

What changed is the payoff. Semrush analysed 248,000 Reddit posts that AI search tools cited, using data refreshed in October 2025. Reddit was the most-cited domain on Perplexity. It ranked second on ChatGPT Search, where 13% of answers carried a Reddit link, and third on Google AI Mode at 9%. The posts the chatbots chose were mostly obscure: 80% had fewer than 20 upvotes, and the median was 5 to 8. AI research agents are just as easy to steer. A May 2026 preprint found that planted text making up only 0.5% to 4% of a subreddit’s content got cited 30% to 53% of the time.

At UpvoteMax’s price, 20 upvotes cost $0.40, enough to put a planted post level with or above four in five of the Reddit posts chatbots cite. UpvoteMax’s own median order is 11 upvotes, for $0.22. That already clears the median of the posts the chatbots pick.

State operations reach the same range. In June 2025, OpenAI, not Reddit, exposed a China-linked operation posting comments to TikTok, X, Reddit and Facebook. One of its Reddit posts reached 44 upvotes, more than four in five of the Reddit posts chatbots cite.

Flow diagram: sellers and brands plant posts on Reddit, chatbots quote them to users, advertisers and AI firms pay Reddit, and real users write posts without payment

The marketing trade has a name: generative engine optimisation, or GEO, meaning work to get a brand named in chatbot answers. One GEO startup, Profound, is valued above $1 billion. Discovered Labs offers managed aged accounts with “warming, karma, and standing” and aims them at the threads ChatGPT cites. It quotes a client whose ChatGPT referrals rose 29%. Its retainers that include Reddit work start at €6,995 a month for 10 Reddit mentions, on a six-month commitment.

Shanzila Ahmed, who runs the agency ReachLLM, says she has landed client posts in ChatGPT within a day and moderates new subreddits herself. She treats account suspensions as “something that we have to work around”. She told Bloomberg (via The Star; TNW) what she does when posts are removed:

“We just need to keep pushing out good new content at regular intervals.”

The same playbook shows up wherever someone has something to sell:

Political campaigns run the same kit on other platforms, from the Santana mine astroturf group to One Nation’s bot farms and fake accounts. Political groups gaming election chatbots have already found other routes into AI answers.

Reddit does remove some of it. It took down some of ReachLLM’s ChatGPT-cited posts and banned most of ReplyGuy’s example accounts. It suspended every Zurich bot, and it says it now checks new accounts for warning signs before they can post. Each of those removals followed exposure, and the sellers have priced suspensions in.

Reddit has also chosen whom to sue. It has gone to court against Anthropic, Perplexity and three scraping firms, and it sent legal demands to the Zurich researchers. Novaknown found no case of Reddit suing or banning a named marketing firm. UpvoteMax, AccsMarket, Discovered Labs and ReachLLM all advertise openly.

The people who caught these campaigns mostly don’t work for Reddit. They were users on r/Games, volunteer moderators on r/Biohackers and r/changemyview, and outside researchers. In 2023, when moderators protested Reddit’s API pricing by taking more than 8,000 subreddits dark, Reddit threatened to replace them. Huffman wrote: “like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass.”

$847 million in ads and a perpetual licence on your posts

Reddit earns from this content twice. It sells ads beside it, and it licenses the content itself. In the third quarter of 2026 it reported $895 million in revenue, $847 million of it from ads, and $283 million in net income. The other $48 million is a line Reddit has said includes data licensing.

Its ad products sell the conversation as proof. “Conversation Summary Add-ons” append “real user posts” below an advertiser’s ad as “built-in social proof”, and Reddit says they lifted clicks 19% over standard image ads. Its “Community Intelligence” product sells marketers “the collective knowledge from the billions of human conversations across Reddit”.

Reddit already owns the right to sell the posts. Its user agreement takes a “worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable” licence to everything you write, “including the right to use Your Content to train AI”. Google pays a reported $60 million a year, and OpenAI has a deal too.

When Reddit sued Anthropic, Lee accused it of using Reddit content “without any return for redditors”. Redditors get no return from Google’s money either. In the suit against Perplexity and the three scrapers, Lee called the site “one of the largest and most dynamic collections of human conversation ever created”. Reddit wrote none of it.

Reddit tells two audiences two different things about that content. To shareholders, its Q2 2026 letter calls Reddit the “most trusted source of authentic human knowledge”. To users, the user agreement says Reddit does not “guarantee the completeness, truthfulness, accuracy, or reliability” of anything they post.

Illustration of a market stall selling speech bubbles labelled human conversation, each with a price tag

Some of the text under users’ names was written by Reddit’s own software. In 2024 Reddit started using AI to translate “Reddit’s corpus” into other languages, and told shareholders the translated posts were surfacing in search engines. It also said translation “drove 4x incremental DAUq”, its count of daily active users. Translation now runs in 30 languages and is “a major driver of top-of-funnel user growth outside the U.S.”

The rest of the growth plan is habit. The Q2 2026 letter says “updated feed models are increasing contribution rates and session frequency”, and that games “drive repeat usage and daily habit”. On 28 October Reddit launched an algorithmic “For You” feed. The next day it said it would push readers to log in, as Google search referrals fall by more than a million a week. COO Jen Wong said logged-in users engage about five times as much and “see more impressions”. Huffman said more than 80% of Reddit’s monetization comes from the app and logged-in users.

Reddit defines a daily active unique as anyone it can identify with a unique identifier who opens a page or the app in a day. The definition never asks whether that visitor is a person. In Q3 Reddit counted 130.3 million of them. Most were not accounts at all: 76.8 million were logged out and 53.5 million logged in. Bought accounts are not what swells the headline number. They sit in the smaller group, the one that earns the money, because every bought account is a logged-in account.

Put the pieces side by side. Every account, real or bought, adds to the logged-in audience Reddit sells to advertisers. Every post, real or planted, is content Reddit can license to AI companies and sell ads beside. Verifying everyone would cost Reddit logged-in users, content and ad revenue.

Reddit has already told Wall Street that daily users could fall by a low double-digit percentage as search traffic dries up. US daily users came in at 50.7 million, down from 53.2 million. It has still guided fourth-quarter revenue to $1.0 billion to $1.03 billion. It plans to close the gap by turning readers into logged-in users. The accounts Reddit now needs most are logged-in accounts, which is exactly what the sellers sell, and verification still waits for suspicion.

Every post, real or planted, is content Reddit can license to AI companies and sell ads beside.

Until that changes, read Reddit as a marketplace rather than a forum:

  • An old account proves nothing. Accounts registered in 2022 sell for 55 cents. Read the history instead. An account that sat quiet for years and wakes up to recommend a product fits the “aged” and “warmed” stock sellers advertise.
  • Check who runs the subreddit. GEO agencies create subreddits and moderate them.
  • Open the thread a chatbot cites. A recommendation with a single-digit vote count is typical of what chatbots quote, and costs pennies to manufacture.

The chatbot telling you what “people on Reddit” recommend may be quoting someone paid $0.20 to say it.

Further Reading