Fast-growing sub-reddits this past week

wholesome GTA V, crows are bros and knitting is popping...

Hey everyone,

This evening we are going to do a one-off for all subscribers on 3 sub-reddits that have grown rapidly over the past week and add some commentary around each one.

For our paid subscribers this will become a weekly thing, doing 5 fast growing and relatively unknown sub-reddits each Monday, so if you want more of this kind of thing, please sign up for that, at just £29 a month, it could be a steal if you can find the next thing that you can start a brand around, invest in, grow your YouTube channel etc.

We’ve already mentioned r/dopaminedetoxing, which has grown by another 6k members since we wrote about it last Thursday. So we won’t include that here for now.

Anyway, let’s get to it…

r/TheGamerLounge (+77%)

“a Reddit Public Access Network (RPAN) broadcast community where you can sit back, relax, stream, and chat with other gamers.”

Now at 4.2k members, the sub was at 2.2k at the start of last week. And has good signs of a classic exponential curve for members.

The Reddit Public Access Network serves random content to its viewers and those viewers choose what type of content they want to follow. Live streams are done from 1am to 5pm Pacific Time every day.

For members, The Gamer Lounge sub ranks just under #20,000 across the whole site, but it generates an insane amount of comments for its size and ranks #46 for the average number of comments per day because there are live streams.

Roughly 5,900 comments every day.

In terms of comments per subscriber it ranks at #2 across the whole of Reddit in the past 24 hours…

In the time we went on the sub-reddit and started watching the top broadcast to now, which was roughly 2-3 minutes. It went from 60 watchers to 257 watchers, which for a small sub-reddit is very impressive.

People play all manner of games in here, some of the top posts of all time include Beyblade battles, programming a calculator to play Pokemon Red, Beat Saber, crossword puzzles and Google Snake.

‘Minesweeper N Chill’ is also a popular style of post.

Some streamers take clips of their entire TV or room with the game they are playing and then converse with fans or viewers in the chat.

One streamer who does ‘GTA V BUT I DONT BREAK THE LAW’ videos did this and got 400+ comments and ~17,200 views in the sub-reddit, throughout the video he just plays GTA V without doing any illegal activities in-game and answers questions as they come in through the chat.

Fast growing sub-reddits like the r/TheGamerLounge can present interesting opportunities for new streamers to build an initial audience for almost free and test out or find a niche area that works for them and then attract paying subscribers to their Twitch, Patreon or other channels.

It should be noted that The Reddit Kitchen and The Artist Studio, two other Public Access network sub-reddits, have grown very quickly over the past week too, by 73.4% and 62.3% respectively.

We won’t comment too extensively here but this growth is a further reflection of the macro trend of the Creator/Passion Economy and some content makers achieving a full-time income and living from streaming, writing or recording their talent or niche area for paying subscribers.

Reddit acts as a great top-of-funnel traffic source for these creators.

Think of the growth in sites that reflect this reality e.g. Outschool, Podia, Thinkific, Substack and so on, even OnlyFans is a reflection of this…

The top content creator on Podia according to an a16z article last October, earns $100,000 a month.

r/Crowbro (+49.4%)

The Crowbro sub-reddit over the past week, saw its members grow by nearly 50%, going from roughly 17k members to 25.3k.

At the beginning of January 2020, the sub-reddit barely had 2k members but accelerated from this point onwards with sudden growth spurts.

On our Twitter channel and initial blog a few weeks back (April 11th) we mentioned the rise of a creator called Falconry & Me in the UK, who had just hit over 50k subscribers at the time from minimal numbers.

She has now hit 120k subscribers on YouTube. Up from 100k on the first.

A video titled ‘Fable the Raven | Did you know Ravens can talk?!’ went viral hitting 3.2m views a few months ago.

She frequently features Fable on her channel and featured the bird in a 100k subscriber giveaway clip.

The r/Crowbro sub-reddit is not especially active, with the number of comments and posts under-indexing against the sub-reddit’s rank for the whole site.

But this fascination with corvids exemplified by this sub-reddit, Falconry and Me and other fast-growing YouTube channels does point to a bigger trend which we think is more and more animals outside of dogs and cats being anthropomorphised (treated like humans) or more like regular pets.

You can see this behaviour in some of the wording of posts and some comments in r/Crowbro and on YouTube.

There would definitely be potential for an interesting brand in this niche, if even a small % of sub-reddit members (e.g. 1-2%) could be converted to buy raven and crow clothing (for people to wear), bird treats, supplements, training guides, trackers, it would be a question of imagination really.

It is a good audience persona to go after if you are really into corvids, like creating a brand around French Bulldogs (e.g. Frenchie), you would have an audience obsessive about those specific birds and everyone knows how obsessive pet owners can be! You can do this for almost any fast growing or sizeable niche where you can really dial in the targeting and talk specifically to that customer.

Maybe Charlie Day’s ‘Fight Milk’ and ‘crowtein’ from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia isn’t such a far off reality after all…

r/KnitHacker (+14.3%)

On Twitter and LinkedIn a couple of weeks back we commented on the surge in members for r/cottagecore.

#Cottagecore started off as a trend on Tumblr, with many people using the tag in long posts using historical prose.

It represents an idealised view of rural life, through fashion and crafts, where day-to-day living is more simple and in harmony with nature and involved a lot of knitting and embroidery.

Dazed magazine used the following description in their April 2020 article:

“The antithesis of the acid-bright e-girls whose visuals dominated social media in 2019, the cottagecore aesthetic is much softer: think Little House on the Prairie-esque faded floral blouses, frilled dresses that could have been lifted directly from Picnic at Hanging Rock, and a whole host of thrift store-acquired knitted cardigans and sweater-vests paired with faded mom-jeans.”

“Along with the rose-tinted and charmingly faded imagery that embodies the subculture’s aesthetic, captions are written in the style of period drama dialogue or historic prose, as cottagecore enthusiasts reach back to a time when technology and environmental woes did not exist.”

Nostalgia has formed the basis for many big macro trends in the past few years e.g. 90s’ fashion and vinyl collecting so it is not surprising to see this movement take shape.

It was already gathering momentum before lockdowns showing this wasn’t just a boredom-induced pattern, although lockdown undoubtedly helped to accelerate the trend.

More generally, the interest in knitting, crocheting and embroidery has been increasing.

And r/KnitHacker’s growth of members in the past week of 14.3% showcases this.

The sub has gone from 3,550 members or so in mid-December to 23,800 members now.

The member growth hasn’t followed a smooth curve like The Gamer Lounge for example but has jumped and moved in step-changes, with sudden bursts of growth here and there since February mainly.

People are encouraged to post videos of pattern mash-ups, tips and tricks and anything related to knitting more broadly. The top post of all time is a crocheted pasta set.

Another knitting related sub-reddit r/tensionporn (‘for when knitting or crocheting has the perfect tension’) has also doubled its subscribers in the past week.

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