New feeding habits for AI: The Reddit-Google deal could show how content will be produced, owned and consumed on internet
Reddit is a social media and news aggregation platform that has some 71 million active daily users who discuss niche subjects in niche groups. On Thursday, the San Francisco-headquartered company signed a $60 million-a-year deal — in Google VP, engineering, Rajan Patel's words, 'a new Cloud partnership' — that will allow Google to mine the social media site's vast content to train its generative AI models.
It had taken eight months for Reddit to sign up a big AI company, after CEO Steve Huffman announced in June 2023 that AI companies consuming Reddit's data to train their LLMs would have to pay up. It appeared as an attempt to bolster the company's revenues and attain profitability before an IPO. 'We'll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive,' Huffman had said then.
The same month, Reddit also announced that all developers like Apollo, Sync, Pushshift and RiF would have to begin paying for using the Reddit API. Many developers were outraged, because Reddit had become a significant social media site by allowing its API to be used for free by developers to build their bots and services. Many dropped out, claiming the new fee-paying model wasn't sustainable, despite the fact that they were making money from subscribers and ads, which they were not sharing with Reddit.
In retrospect, it appears that Reddit had re-evaluated its path to profitability before its IPO, by monetising both its APIs and content, and was taking firm steps to get there.
As a result, the players involved have, consciously or
