Reddit punches far above its weight as only 6% of online adults use it (but 11% of Hispanics)

Talk about punching above your weight.

Reddit, the self-styled “front page of the Internet” that has can send floods of traffic to unsuspecting sites and has luminaries like President Barack Obama visiting to answer questions directly from the great unwashed, is only visited by 6 percent of American adults who are online, according to the Pew Research Center.

Pew’s newest Internet & American Life Project also says that, unsurprisingly, a larger percent of young males frequent the site — 15 percent — while only 5 percent of women age 18-29 visit Reddit.

Those number might compare poorly to Twitter, which 16 percent of the population uses, and particularly Facebook, which boasts a 67 percent share. But Reddit’s passionate and engaged community has resulted in celebrities and scientists — including the wealthiest man in the world, Bill Gates — visiting the site so that Redditors can “ask them anything.” Neither Facebook nor Twitter can boast something similar.

Reddit revealed some amazing traffic numbers for 2012: 37 billion pageviews, 400 million unique visitors, four billion votes, 30 million posts, and 260 million comments. And the community that makes that possible was one of the driving forces behind today’s July 4 “Restore the Fourth” movement against NSA/PRISM surveillance.

Interestingly, while the site is overwhelmingly male, it’s fairly multiethnic. While only 5 percent of white adults use Reddit, 4 percent of black adults do, and a much larger 11 percent of Hispanic adults visit Reddit as well.