OMR 2026, Day 2: Reddit, AI Overviews and Klöckner's Reality Check
Day 2 was more substantial than Day 1. Three sessions, a bat on the main stage — and the most honest AI reality check of the year.
Tom Adebahr
Thought Leadership KI
- Reddit ist die meistunterschätzte Marketing-Plattform 2026: Platz 2 in Google AI Overviews, 500 Mio. aktive Nutzer/Woche, 40 % aller Posts mit kommerzieller Relevanz.
- AI Overviews fressen 15–30 % organischen Traffic: Über 250 Mio. Klicks pro Monat verlieren deutsche Websites — Chunking, Listicles und YouTube sind die einzigen Gegenstrategien.
- 790 Mrd. Dollar in Datenzentren in 2025: 2 Mrd. pro Werktag, mehr als Manhattan-Projekt, Marshall-Plan und Apollo zusammen — Anthropic dominiert mit 3 von 4 Enterprise-Dollar.
- Reddit is 2026's most underrated marketing platform: #2 in Google AI Overviews, 500M weekly active users, 40 % of posts have commercial relevance.
- AI Overviews eat 15–30 % of organic traffic: German sites lose 250M+ clicks per month — chunking, listicles and YouTube are the only counter-strategies.
- $790B in data centers in 2025: $2B per workday — more than Manhattan, Marshall and Apollo combined. Anthropic dominates with 3 of 4 enterprise AI dollars.
- Default AI output is not leadership: Use AI like everyone else, sound like everyone else. Own profile, own style, own data.
Hamburg, May 6, 2026 — the rhythm has set in
Day 2 of OMR begins differently than day 1. The initial buzz has faded, the rhythm has set in. You know how it is: between sessions you meet people you only know from LinkedIn — and end up talking for twenty minutes about something completely different than planned. That's how today went, too.
Between sessions, a quick chat with Trustpilot's founder about hiring processes then and now. Reuniting with Anabell and Nathalie from XING. And one of those rare moments when an idea hits and you scribble it down immediately: how can we do an even better job of turning topics around technical documentation into content?
But first things first. Three sessions defined day 2 — and all three deserve a deep dive.
Session 1: State of the Internet 2026
The annual State of the Internet presentation has become a fixed anchor for me at OMR. The format is proven: winners, losers, macro trends, concrete marketing strategies.
The Winners: Founders Under 30, Theme Parks and Google
The strongest image right at the start: a new generation of under-30 founders is building billion-dollar companies. Kalshi as a prediction market platform, Axiom for mathematical problem-solving, Mercury as the AI expert for AI models. Combined value of these young founders: $100 billion. For comparison: the entire German DAX has a market cap of $300 billion. This isn't an attack on Germany — but it's an image worth remembering.
What surprised me: theme parks as a growth topic. Digital brands become physical experiences. Disney earns $10 billion with parks. Netflix is building a Netflix House in Philadelphia. There's a Minecraft Park in England, a Pokémon Park in Tokyo. And as a German example: Karls Erdbeerhof with 14 locations and plans for California. Same principle, very different executions.
Google is also among the winners: five Nobel Prizes in two years to current or former employees. That says more about the company's depth than any quarterly report.
The Losers: Bitcoin, Cannabis and the Computer Science Degree
Bitcoin has lost 25 percent since Trump — despite a crypto-friendly administration. The e-prescription and Doctolib stock haven't developed as hoped. Cannabis legalization didn't trigger the expected price gains.
The most interesting loser story: the classic computer science degree. In the US, graduates currently have an unemployment rate similar to performing arts majors. A data point I'm still thinking about.
Reddit: The Most Important Marketing Platform Nobody Talks About
This is where it got operational. Reddit ranks #2 in most-cited domains in Google AI Overviews, right behind YouTube. 500 million weekly active users. 40 percent of all Reddit posts have commercial relevance. In the last two years Reddit has overtaken Bild, Spiegel and Zeit in Google visibility.
The strategies presented are concrete and immediately actionable:
The principle is always the same: listen before you speak. Observe Reddit subreddits, use Reddit Answers and Reddit Pro Trends, understand real discussions. Then enter the community — not as a brand, but as a human.
AI Overviews Are Eating SEO Traffic
This is the uncomfortable topic many aren't yet willing to say out loud: Google AI Overviews pull 15 to 30 percent of organic traffic. German-language sites lose over a quarter billion clicks per month.
Chunking: Break content into atomic chunks — one question, max two sentences answer. Techniker Krankenkasse does this consistently with an FAQ format. Listicles: Best-of lists work especially well. Brevo gets into the AI Overviews with its own listicle about email marketing tools. YouTube: The most-cited domain in AI Overviews. Title, detailed description, chapters, clean transcript. Westwing shows what this looks like in practice with a simple video about hallway decoration.
Micro-Shows as the Content Format of the Hour
730 billion hours spent in AI apps in 2024 — compared to 2.5 billion hours on social media. On Instagram only 7 percent of content actually comes from friends or followed accounts. The rest is algorithm.
In this environment, brands are betting on micro-shows: vertical video, 60 to 180 seconds, episodic, with recognition effects. The examples were impressive in their range: "IT-Praxis Dr. Bauer" with over 100,000 followers and €250,000 in merchandise revenue. The Cheese Store of Beverly Hills with 300 million views. A shaving specialty store from Lübeck: 36 million views, revenue 6x.
The recommendation is clear: experiment with formats, then stick with them. Recognizability in the feed is everything.
Session 2: Philipp Klöckner — "Beyond the AI Hype"
I'd been looking forward to this session for months. The slide battle delivered. Philipp Klöckner used six different AI agents to prepare this keynote: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, a Chinese model and DeepSeek. The result was a talk with more substance than most I've heard in recent years.
The Sober Reality Check
AI has evolved more dramatically over the past year than ever before. Model capabilities have improved massively. Image generation models reached a new quality level: no broken fonts, no artifacts. AI can now work autonomously for half a day and complete complex tasks with a 50 percent success rate.
At the same time: usage costs are dropping dramatically. 10 to 100 times cheaper than a year ago. A 1,000-page book like "War and Peace" could be generated today in one minute for 15 cents. For the first time, there's more AI-generated text on the internet than human content.
The Investment Dimension That Dwarfs Everything
In 2024, $400 billion went into data centers. In 2025 it'll be approximately $790 billion — $2 billion per workday for new data centers alone. These investments exceed the Manhattan Project, the Marshall Plan, the Apollo Program and the International Space Station combined. Big Tech is going net negative on debt to invest more than the corporations currently earn. About 80 new nuclear power plants will be needed to meet energy demand.
This is the number that makes my question from day 1 even more urgent: 6 gigawatts for Europe by 2030, while the world is sinking $790 billion per year. The orders of magnitude simply don't match.
Who Wins the AI Market? Anthropic.
In B2B, the answer is currently very clear: Anthropic. Three out of four dollars enterprises spend on AI go to Anthropic. OpenAI is stagnating in enterprise. Google Gemini is gaining ground through free offerings and distribution across 9 apps with over a billion users each.
Anthropic's path to market leadership: focus on B2B customers, software development, higher customer retention. Average AI contracts grew from $40,000 (2023) to a projected $1 million per enterprise (2025). Interesting note: Klöckner has heard Anthropic could be at $44 billion annual revenue, potentially overtaking OpenAI.
China and the Raw-Material Logic of AI
The most uncomfortable image of the day: China is building models at one-twentieth of US costs and reaching similar performance. DeepSeek costs less than 1 percent of US models at slightly lower performance. China "distills" the knowledge from US models and offers it far cheaper. Many startups already use the cheaper China models. China is becoming the world's AI factory for low-cost models.
Particularly serious for Germany: no large domestic LLM. 90 percent of AI chips are made in Taiwan. The only viable strategy: hold on to your own data and capture the value from it.
The Reality of Adoption
Over 80 percent of companies are experimenting with AI — but most are still in pilots. Two-thirds of AI users give up after one month. 75 percent have fewer than 10 conversations per week. Only one in five employees even gets access to a chatbot from their employer.
And then the sentence that hung in the room: only 0.3 percent of the population has ever built anything with AI. 80 percent of people have never even used AI. The market potential lies almost entirely ahead of us.
Default AI Output Is Not Leadership
AI-generated content is flooding the internet with the same phrases. Even CEOs have most of their speeches written by AI. Klöckner nailed it: default AI output signals insecurity, not strength. Human content should carry a "bio seal" — similar to what Spotify has introduced for human artists.
"Use AI like everyone else, sound like everyone else. Reject default settings — own style, own data, own voice."
— Sinngemäß nach Philipp Klöckner / OMR 2026Session 3: Doppelgänger Podcast Live
As one of Spotify's top 1 percent listeners, this moment was something special. Philipp Klöckner and Philipp Glöckler live in Hamburg, in a hall full of people who clearly follow the podcast as closely as I do.
What I didn't expect: the honesty with which the two talked about their own conference routine. A typical OMR day: 1 to 2 talks in the morning, then from 11am Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten for networking and food. The podcast exists, they admitted openly, mainly to justify these multi-day hotel visits. The hall laughed — and it was one of those moments where you understand why this format works.
The Image of the Day: The Bat
During the main keynote "German State of the Internet" a bat flew through the hall. The way this caused brief confusion, then laughter, then one LinkedIn post after another, shows what OMR is at its core: a human event that — with the best preparation in the world — keeps producing moments you can't plan.
My Take on Day 2
Day 2 was more substantial than day 1. The State of the Internet presentation delivered concrete actionables (Reddit, AI Overviews, micro-shows) I'm taking with me directly. Klöckner's talk was the intellectually densest of this year's OMR: sober, data-driven, and in its analysis of Germany and Europe more honest than most of the political statements the day before. PIP is exceptional.
Experiencing the Doppelgänger Podcast live was personally special. I owe this podcast a lot. It has shaped my thinking about business, technology and society over the last 4–5 years. And today it was just great to see the two of them live. What a joy. I love their humor — not for nothing am I a top 1 percent listener on Spotify.
And a bat on the main stage too. Not bad for a Wednesday in Hamburg.
A bit friendlier Hamburg weather, better and more coffee — and just like recently at FIBU, the same here in Hamburg: conference food is essentially unsalvageable (at least if you want to live as healthily as I try to).