Reddit’s advertising revenue grew to $315.1 million, while “other” revenue reached $33.2 million on account of “data licensing agreements signed earlier this year.” Both Google and OpenAI have cut deals with Reddit to train their AI models on its posts.
In a letter to shareholders, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman attributed the recent increase in users to the platform’s AI-powered translation feature. Reddit started letting users translate posts into French last year before expanding to Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and German. Now, Huffman says Reddit plans to expand translation to over 30 countries through 2025.
This sounds familiar, almost as if history could perhaps, maybe, just possibly… repeat itself? Nah! (says spez)
People will follow the content creators indeed. Right now I’m not sure where they went though. The last I looked, it was basically nowhere, though to the extent that it was anything I thought it was X (even if via a temporary Mastodon intermediate). Musk fed Huffman bad info, which the Musk himself was not doing (or rather, the circumstances were entirely opposite - a public company going private rather than one attempting to make the polar opposition transition), and Huffman was dumb enough to fall for it, then Musk rakes in the rewards for his dirty deed.
Nowadays - or perhaps soon - as you said it might be Bluesky. So trading one corporate landlord for another, but it makes sense - the content creators will go wherever their audience is, and then the latter will in turn mindlessly follow the hoarde, but with an enormous delay measured in high number of months to even years. Plus, content creators need revenue to survive, e.g. how many videos is Ian Danskin (of Innuendo Studios) putting out these days? Then again, how many people especially younger ones even watch 20-30 minute long “video essays”, rather than TikTok(-style) short-form clips?
All the rest: yup.
Digg, right? Yeah. Perhaps spez even knew that it would repeat, but was smart (and shitty) enough to jump off the ship before it happened.
Definitely Reddit’s buildup was smart. The transition to profitability not so much. Although we’ll see.
Man, remember all those who kept arguing against it? I would say “Reddit is dying”, and these new accounts that had never visited my sub before we decided it should go dark suddenly appeared and started talking crap about anyone who criticized Reddit. That should have been a smoking gun alone for people to realize what was going on. But instead, people just said “yup, that’s Reddit for you”. Which extremely unfortunately… they were right, bc that is what it had become by that time.
i.e., spez didn’t kill Reddit by denying the usage of third-party apps - that was merely the final nail in the coffin for many of us, topping off a process that had begun several years earlier.