Online news aggregation and discussion website Reddit will expand its business to Australia, opening an office in Sydney to look after local communities, moderation and sales.

The move follows the US-based company’s expansions to the UK and Canada, as part of an international push to offer more value to local brands and advertisers hoping to tap into Reddit’s 52 million daily active users.

The site’s local operations in Barangaroo will be managed by David Ray, currently head of digital platforms at WooliesX, who was previously involved in the Australian expansions of Twitter and Amazon Music.

Reddit said Australians make up the site’s fourth largest user base, growing at 40 per cent per year. Australian users spend an average of 31 minutes per day on Reddit, collectively contributing 158 million posts, comments and votes each month.

“One of the benefits of having dedicated resources on the ground is that local users can build local communities and with local context,” said Reddit chief operating officer Jen Wong.

“And as a result, what we can do is also serve local advertisers and bring them onto our ad platform.”

The site is broken up into more than 100,000 largely self-organised communities, which can be as broad as r/science (26.5 million members) or as specific as r/frenchrap (7400 members), and ranks posts by how many upvotes they receive. Meanwhile the home page aggregates stories and content from across the entire site.

While Reddit itself only has a few hundred full-time employees, the communities are managed by thousands of volunteer moderators, who Ms Wong said are driven by the knowledge and passion around each topic.

“So you’ll have people who will lead an infertility subreddit, and it’s because they suffer from infertility and just want other people to get help,” she said.