Reddit RDDT and Alphabet GOOGL are major players in the digital advertising space. While RDDT is an emerging social media platform gaining traction with community-driven advertising, GOOGL remains the dominant force in global search and digital ad markets.
Per the Fortune Business Insights report, the global digital advertising market size was valued at $573.06 million in 2025. The market is expected to grow from $662.52 million in 2026 to $2,114.41 million by 2034, expanding at a CAGR of 15.61% during the forecast period between 2026 and 2034. Both Reddit and Alphabet are expected to benefit from this rapid growth pace.
RDDT or GOOGL — Which of these Digital Advertising stocks has the greater upside potential? Let’s find out.
Reddit is benefiting from its strong focus on enhancing user-friendly features, which is driving significant growth in user engagement and ad revenue. In the third quarter of 2025, Advertising revenues surged 74% year over year to $549 million.
The company is benefiting from its investment in AI-powered tools, which are driving the company’s user engagement and ad revenue. In the third quarter of 2025, RDDT reported 116 million daily active users and 444 million weekly active users, both increasing 20% year over year. In the third quarter of 2025, ARPU increased 41% year over year to $5.04, indicating that portfolio expansions are driving higher monetization per user.
Further expanding its portfolio, Reddit recently announced the beta launch of Max campaigns. This AI-powered, automated ad solution optimizes targeting, creative, placements, and budget in real-time to improve performance and reduce manual effort. Using Reddit Community Intelligence, Max campaigns offer unique audience insights, including Top Audience Personas, which help advertisers understand who engages with their campaigns and what content resonates. Early testers experienced up to 27% more conversions and lower costs, showing both efficiency and effectiveness.
Alphabet is benefiting from rising advertising revenue, driven by strong growth in its Google Services segment, particularly in Search and YouTube. In the third quarter of 2025, Alphabet’s advertising revenues increased 12.6% year over year to $74.18 billion and accounted for 85.2% of total revenues. Search and other revenues accounted for 55.3% of total revenues and 76.3% of Google Advertising revenues. YouTube’s advertising revenues improved 15% year over year to $10.26 billion.
The Google search engine is advanced, simple, and adaptable, all at once. Alphabet’s initiatives to deploy AI and infuse AI in Search are driving segment growth. Alphabet’s initiatives, like the Mobile Friendly algorithm change, product listings, flight search, Google Now, and the AI infusion is expected to help drive Alphabet’s advertising revenues.
Alphabet’s innovative AI-powered advertising products, such as AI Max, are unlocking new opportunities for advertisers. AI Max is helping businesses identify new customers by delivering the most relevant ad across surfaces. It is also expanding the reach and accessibility of advertisers by matching them against additional queries. GOOGL continues to infuse Generative AI (Gen AI) capabilities at every step of the marketing process. The availability of Imagen 4 in Asset Studio and Product Studio is helping businesses produce more and better creatives.
