Reddit might let users make paid subreddits

You mightiness person to wage to entree immoderate subreddits successful the future. During an net telephone connected Tuesday, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman hinted astatine “new types of subreddits that tin beryllium built that whitethorn person exclusive contented oregon backstage areas.”

“I deliberation the existing, altruistic, escaped mentation of Reddit volition proceed to beryllium and turn and thrive conscionable the mode it has,” Huffman said. “But present we volition unlock the doorway for caller usage cases, caller types of subreddits that tin beryllium built.” Huffman said helium doesn’t deliberation these gated communities would “cannibalize” the site, which has seen an summation successful users implicit the past fewer months. The site’s daily progressive users jumped 51 percent, bringing its full to 91.2 million, portion its gross besides accrued by 54 percent to $281.2 million.

Based connected a connection from Reddit, it appears the “exclusive” areas mentioned by Huffman could person a paywall. “We’ve had versions of premium assemblage features successful the past, similar r/goldlounge, that users loved, truthful we’re exploring caller ways to empower moderators and communities to effort exclusive spaces and content,” Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt tells The Verge. “We’ll fto you cognize erstwhile we person much to share.”

Additionally, Huffman mentioned during the telephone that Reddit has started to “enhance” its hunt results utilizing first-party and third-party AI models. We archetypal heard astir Reddit utilizing AI for hunt successful February, arsenic its AI grooming woody with Google includes entree to Google’s Vertex AI instrumentality that helps companies amended hunt results.

Reddit took a harder stance connected web crawlers past month, with the institution blocking hunt engines, similar Microsoft Bing, that haven’t paid for entree to its content. In an interrogation with The Verge, Huffman said it’s “been a existent symptom successful the ass” to artifact Microsoft and AI companies, similar Anthropic and Perplexity, from scraping the site.

This much assertive attack to concern is portion of Reddit’s program to execute profitability, but it volition request to guarantee it doesn’t upset users successful the process — thing we saw with past year’s site-wide protests against Reddit’s API pricing.