Is YouTube traffic better than Reddit's?
Last month, I launched a free product to help radiologists browse scan images. As expected, the first place I promoted it was in Reddit radiology/med engineering communities. My traffic peaked at 56 visitors a day. My bounce rate, however, was consistently >80%.
Recently, I encountered a Reddit post that suggested I leave comments and respond to comments on YouTube videos that my ideal users would watch. For me, that meant videos explaining how to read scan images. I gave it a try. It's been 2 weeks now, and I have observed the following:
- My traffic referrers now include Google. I think these are visitors off YouTube--I did not provide clickable links in my comments, and it started showing after my YouTube comments.
- Google traffic is increasingly forming a bigger fraction of my traffic.
- My overall bounce rate is still high (83%). However, when I filter just for Google, the bounce rate is 51%.
Also, promoting on YouTube is much faster and much simpler (I use relevantcomments[dot]com to identify comments worth responding to).
Now I am wondering:
- Does anyone have a similar/comparable experience?
- Does it make sense to just go all in on YouTube and scale back Reddit, especially since it is much easier and faster?
Thanks
Posted Oct 10, 2025, 7:28 PM UTC
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