Reddit held its second earnings call of this year on Tuesday. The community-driven platform posted over 50% growth in both revenue and users year-on-year. Talking about the future of the platform, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told investors that the brand plans to test AI-powered search result pages. In addition to the AI search results, Huffman has also hinted that Reddit could soon get paid subreddits.
Reddit will test AI-powered search result pages to summarize and recommend content
During the earnings call, Reddit CEO suggested that some significant changes could soon be coming to the platform. The first one is the AI-powered search features. The company will start testing AI-powered search results at some point later this year. The brand will utilize AI tools to summarize and recommend content. The CEO noted that it will help users “dive deeper” into content, apart from discovering new Reddit communities.
Huffman said that Reddit will be utilizing a combination of in-house and third-party AI technologies to power the AI-fuelled search result pages. Huffman believes that search could one day be a very important source of revenue for Reddit.
It is not the first time we have heard about AI developments at Reddit. Earlier in May, Reddit partnered with OpenAI to leverage the latter’s LLM models and create AI-powered features for Redditors or moderators. Now, the company seems to be going into full drive mode for AI-generated search results by kicking off the testing later this year.
Reddit CEO also hinted at paid subreddits as a mode of monetization
Reddit went public earlier this year in March. Ever since going public, the company has been looking for new sources of revenue. During the earnings call, Huffman hinted that the company might experiment with paid subreddits as it looks to monetize new features. As of now, there aren’t many details on how it will work. However, there’s a possibility, this way, Reddit could also let Redditors make money off its platform.
It will be another non-advertising source of revenue for the brand. The company has already struck multi-million-dollar licensing deals with Google and OpenAI. Notably, the brand has already blocked search engines that aren’t paying to search its content.
2024-08-07 15:06:58