Reddit has announced a new set of custom avatars for the Super Bowl, created in partnership with the NFL, which will give football fans another way to engage with the event.

As you can see in this image, Reddit’s football avatars will be available in Kansas City and Philadelphia colors, and will provide another way for Reddit users to show their support within the app.

And a lot of Redditors are indeed football fans. Reddit says that it facilitates 411 million views in football-related communities every month, including 195 million monthly views for r/NFL. Reddit also says that there was a 32% YoY increase in Super Bowl mentions in the app last year.

Reddit’s avatars, meanwhile, have proven surprisingly popular in their own right, with the simple, mascot images becoming a hot commodity on NFT trading forums late last year.

As reported by NFT Now:

“Just three months after the company introduced its NFT project [in July], four separate Reddit Collectible Avatar collections found themselves on OpenSea’s Top 10 list for 24-hour trading volume, with one collection knocking CryptoPunks out of the number one spot. Just prior to this feat, it also came to light that Reddit users had created three million Vault crypto wallets on the platform since July, surpassing even OpenSea in the number of active wallets on its platform.”

Now, that last stat is slightly misleading, as Reddit gifted users with free avatars, which, in order to claim, you had to register for a Vault wallet. So it’s not exactly the level of organic growth or interest implied, but still, Reddit avatars have proven popular – and that’s despite the broader downturn in the NFT market.

Which has been significant.

As you can see in this chart from Statista, interest in NFTs has waned significantly after their initial boom period in late 2021, where people were either all-in or all-out, with no in-between,

Now, it seems that far more people are out – but still, NFT trading still has a niche audience, and certain projects maintain loyal followings and communities.

Reddit Avatars may be one of the projects that shrugs the trend, and maybe, with seasonal releases like this, Reddit can continue to maintain interest and engagement, which will then flow through to app activity.