How to grow a subreddit: what 12.5 million crossposts show

How to grow a subreddit with crossposts: what the data says

• Crosspost into subreddits that share your people. A crosspost into a subreddit where the same people already post brought 2.62 newcomers from there; one into a subreddit with a different crowd, 0.38. Of those, 0.53 against 0.04 stayed. See the evidence.
• Crosspost your best posts, not every post. Posts that made their home subreddit's top 10% reached the top 10% of the receiving subreddit 10.2% of the time, more often than normal posts (8.3%). Posts below the home median: 1.1%. Details.
• Give the post a little time first. Strong posts crossposted within 10 minutes reached the top 10% 8.6% of the time; after 1 to 6 hours, 11.3%. Timing.
• Skip the giant subreddits. Crossposts into a subreddit over 100 times bigger than the home one reached its top 10% 1.3% of the time and were removed 21.0% of the time. 63% of subreddits with over 1 million subscribers don't accept crossposts at all. Which subreddits accept them.
• Two or three subreddits beat one. Weeks with crossposts into 2 subreddits brought 2.2 extra people, 3 or more 2.7, against 1.3 for one. Sending your own post to 10 to 19 subreddits didn't raise the removal rate (14.7% against 14.3% for one).
• Don't spend time on a new title. Strong posts crossposted with a changed title reached the top 10% 10.3% of the time; with the same title, 10.2%.
• Expect a few people per crosspost. About 1 in 10 extra newcomers was still active 2 to 5 weeks later. Crossposting brings people to the door; the subreddit has to keep them.

Crossposts tripled since mid-2025

From 2019 to 2022, crossposts were 2.9% to 4.1% of non-NSFW Reddit posts in any month. In June 2025 there were 621,740, 2.9% of posts. In September 2026 there were 1,897,882, 8.6%, and 871,864 people made at least one, against 227,946 in June 2025.

Most of the rise happened overnight. In the week before July 11, 2025 there were 21,932 crossposts a day by 13,290 people; in the week from that day, 37,481 a day by 25,381 people. The new crossposts look different: the share of people crossposting their own post went from 54% to 73%, and the typical gap between the original and the crosspost fell from 69 to 11 minutes. That pattern fits a change that made it quicker to send a fresh post to more subreddits, though the data alone can't say what changed. From May 2026 to September 2026, 85% of crossposts were made by the author of the original.

Does a crosspost bring people to your subreddit?

Yes, a few. The study took every week between December 1, 2025 and August 17, 2026 in which a post from a subreddit was crossposted elsewhere, with no other crosspost from it in the 4 weeks before or the week after: 539,437 such weeks. Each was compared with weeks in the same subreddit-size bracket, in the same calendar week, with a similar number of posts and of recent newcomers, but no crosspost. "New people" are accounts that posted or commented in the subreddit for the first time in 13 weeks.

Across all of them, a crosspost week brought 1.55 more new people over that week and the next than the matched weeks did (95% interval 1.50 to 1.59). Subreddits that crosspost were already growing a little faster: the same comparison on the 2 weeks before the crosspost shows 0.31. Taking that out leaves 1.23. The first and second halves of the period agree (1.34 and 1.14 after the same adjustment).

Source: KissMyPost analysis of public Reddit posts and comments back to 2005.

For the smallest subreddits a crosspost more than doubles a quiet fortnight (0.4 usual newcomers, 0.7 extra). For a subreddit with 65 to 512 active people, the extra 6.6 are on top of 74.0 who came anyway. Weeks in which the crosspost reached the receiving subreddit's top 10% brought 4.1 extra people, more than 3 times the 1.2 of the rest. Weeks in which someone else crossposted the post brought 3.8, about 4 times the 1.0 of weeks in which only the author did. Other people tend to crosspost posts that are already doing well, so part of that gap is the post, not who shared it.

Where the new people come from

If crossposts bring people, the newcomers should come from the subreddit the crosspost went to. They do. Per crosspost week, the home subreddit got 0.50 newcomers who had posted in the receiving subreddit during the 13 weeks before, in the 2 weeks before the crosspost, and 1.20 in the 2 weeks after. The difference, 0.70, is about 46% of the total effect above, and it comes with no matching and no model: the same subreddits, the same receiving subreddits, before and after. The rest are likely people who only read the receiving subreddit, who can't be traced this way.

Source: KissMyPost analysis of public Reddit posts and comments back to 2005.

The receiving subreddit matters more than anything else in this study. For weeks with a single crosspost, when the receiving subreddit was among the home subreddit's closest neighbours by shared posters, the crosspost brought 2.62 newcomers from it; when it wasn't, 0.38. That's nearly 7 times as many, and over 10 times as many who stayed (0.53 against 0.04). In KissMyPost, the Related section of a subreddit's page lists the subreddits that share members with it, and Find Subs ranks subreddits by how close they are to one you name.

How crossposts do in the other subreddit

A crosspost competes with the normal posts of the subreddit it lands in, and it usually loses. Of 5,765,268 crossposts from May 2026 to September 2026, 3.3% reached the receiving subreddit's top 10% for the month, less than half the rate of normal posts there (8.3%). 19.5% beat the median, against 38.8% of normal posts. They were removed about as often as normal posts (13.7% against 14.5%).

What decides it is how the post did at home. Posts in their home subreddit's top 10% did better than an average normal post when crossposted (10.2%); posts below the home median almost never got anywhere (1.1%). At every level, crossposts by someone other than the author did better than the author's own: for strong posts 12.1% against 8.4%, for weak ones 4.0% against 1.0%.

Timing, titles and how many subreddits

Right after posting is the most common moment to crosspost and the weakest one. For posts that made their home top 10%, crossposts in the first 10 minutes reached the receiving subreddit's top 10% 8.6% of the time, and from 10 minutes on, 10.6% or more. Waiting a few hours also tells you whether the post is worth crossposting at all.

A new title made no difference for strong posts (10.3% with a changed title, 10.2% with the same one). Bigger receiving subreddits were harder: into a subreddit smaller than the home one, 4.0% reached the top 10% and 12.6% were removed; into one over 100 times bigger, 1.3% and 21.0%.

Sending one post to several subreddits wasn't punished by removals: authors who sent their own post to one subreddit saw 14.3% of crossposts removed, and those who sent it to 10 to 19, 14.7%. This counts removals only; bans and account limits aren't visible here. More subreddits also meant more people: weeks with crossposts into 2 subreddits brought 2.2 extra newcomers and 3 or more brought 2.7, against 1.3 for one, so each extra subreddit adds less than the first.

Which subreddits accept crossposts

Of 126,560 active non-NSFW subreddits checked on October 5, 2026, 11% don't accept crossposts. It depends on size: 2.2% of subreddits under 1,000 subscribers block them, 42% of those with 100,000 to 1 million and 63% of those over 1 million. A subreddit with this setting can't be picked as a crosspost target.

How this was measured

Crossposts: every non-NSFW crosspost from November 2025 to September 2026 where the original was in a different subreddit and also non-NSFW, by accounts not on the known-bot list (12.5 million crossposts with a known original). "Top 10%" means a score above the 90th percentile of normal posts in the receiving subreddit in the same month. Months before May 2026 and from May 2026 on were checked separately; the tables show the later months, and the CSV has both.

Growth: for each subreddit and week, the people who posted or commented, and how many of them had not done so in the 13 weeks before. Weeks with a single crosspost (none in the 4 weeks before, none in the week after) were compared with weeks without crossposts that matched on calendar week, posts that week, and newcomers and active people in the 2 weeks before (brackets of doubling size), with at least 10 matching weeks; 99.3% of crosspost weeks had them. The same comparison shifted 2 weeks earlier gives the growth that was already there; the adjusted numbers subtract it. "Still active" means posting or commenting again 2 to 5 weeks after arriving.

Limits: subscribers and readers who never post or comment aren't counted, so the real number of people reached is higher than "new people". Shared posters come from the subreddit-similarity map in KissMyPost. The source data is public Reddit posts and comments back to 2005.

The data

The numbers behind every table and chart are in these files. They're free to reuse under CC BY 4.0; please credit KissMyPost and link to this page. For when to post the original, see the best time to post on Reddit.

• CSVGrowth after a crosspostExtra new people in the 2 weeks after a crosspost against matched weeks, with 95% intervals, the pre-existing growth and the adjusted number, by subreddit size, period, top 10% reach, who crossposted and number of receiving subreddits.
• CSVNewcomers from the receiving subredditNewcomers who had posted in the receiving subreddit, 2 weeks before and after the crosspost, by subreddit size, shared members and receiving subreddit size.
• CSVHow crossposts doShare of crossposts in the receiving subreddit's top 10%, above its median and removed, by how the original did, who crossposted, timing, size, title and number of subreddits; both halves of the period.
• CSVCrossposts by month, 2019 to 2026Crossposts, share of non-NSFW posts and people crossposting, by month.
• CSVSubreddits that don't accept crosspostsSubreddits accepting and not accepting crossposts by subscriber count, 2026-10-05.
• PNGShared-members chart, 1600 × 1000Extra newcomers by where the crosspost went, as an image.
• PNGGrowth chart, 1600 × 1000Usual and extra newcomers by subreddit size, as an image.

Questions people ask

This study uses the same data as KissMyPost, a Reddit analytics tool. It shows which subreddits share members, posting rules and requirements, and when posts do well in a subreddit.