Reddit’s team has officially opened its doors on Monday in the Holborn district of London, achieving a part of its vision of international expansion and attracting local clients to advertise on the site.

“We have about 430 million global monthly active users, in which 50% are international,” said Harold Klaje, VP of Global Advertising at Reddit, a social news aggregation site founded in San Francisco in 2005.

Klaje has worked in international marketing for nearly two decades, living in places like Singapore, Japan, and the US. He has also managed and led sales teams in a number of countries spanning across five different continents.

He previously worked for Google for nearly a decade as a global managing director and as head of growth with Pinterest before joining the Reddit team in May 2020.

Klaje is responsible for growing Reddit’s global advertising partner base, building out the sales team and internal operations, and working closely with cross-functional partners to ensure the right products, campaign support and marketing programs across the business.

“We have been working with clients in the UK, and now with our local team there,” Klaje stated. “I’m sure we’ll only enhance and make our local interactions with local brands even stronger.”

The VP explains that the UK is second to the US in the number of active Redditors around the world.

The social medium’s rising popularity has already caught the interest of a number of advertisers in the UK and elsewhere.

Companies like Samsung have partnered with Reddit to promote the Galaxy Note 20 earlier this year. Samsung UK social media lead Roseanna Burns called the end results of the advertising campaign “outstanding” and will continue to work with Reddit to promote future Samsung products.

The majority of people who are active on Reddit join communities related to their interests in order to seek out helpful information.

While some communities have millions of members from around the world, other users may join smaller pages based on their location in order to receive the most recent news in their area.

“What we’re seeing is that people are really trusting each other in these communities,” Klaje said. “And they’re building out a lot of ideas and validating a lot of those ideas with the community members.”

Klaje also stated that Reddit has an “unduplicated reach” to users that are not as active on other popular social media sites. Roughly 68% of UK users are between the ages of 18 to 34 years old.

According to research, 48% of UK Redditors are not active on Snapchat and 26% don’t use Instagram.

UK Reddit users are a unique audience for advertisers as it was found in one recent study that about 75% of site users were positively receptive to brand participation. Additionally, 66% of users trusted brands more when there was active participation on their part by conversing with users directly.

Klaje said,: “When I said you have these communities, it’s not like they’re trying to not have brands participate in that. Actually, they’re open-minded. As long as it’s something that is a part of that community, it’s interesting for them, they want to learn about it, they want to read about it, then they’ll want to respond to it.”