Reddit Grows, Seeks More AI Deals, Plans 'Award' Shops, and Gets Sued (yahoo.com) 19
Reddit reported its first results since going public in late March. Yahoo Finance reports:
Daily active users increased 37% year over year to 82.7 million. Weekly active unique users rose 40% from the prior year. Total revenue improved 48% to $243 million, nearly doubling the growth rate from the prior quarter, due to strength in advertising. The company delivered adjusted operating profits of $10 million, versus a $50.2 million loss a year ago. [Reddit CEO Steve] Huffman declined to say when the company would be profitable on a net income basis, noting it's a focus for the management team. Other areas of focus include rolling out a new user interface this year, introducing shopping capabilities, and searching for another artificial intelligence content licensing deal like the one with Google.
Bloomberg notes that already Reddit "has signed licensing agreements worth $203 million in total, with terms ranging from two to three years. The company generated about $20 million from AI content deals last quarter, and expects to bring in more than $60 million by the end of the year."
And elsewhere Bloomberg writes that Reddit "plans to expand its revenue streams outside of advertising into what Huffman calls the 'user economy' — users making money from others on the platform... " In the coming months Reddit plans to launch new versions of awards, which are digital gifts users can give to each other, along with other products... Reddit also plans to continue striking data licensing deals with artificial intelligence companies, expanding into international markets and evaluating potential acquisition targets in areas such as search, he said.
Meanwhile, ZDNet notes that this week a Reddit announcement "introduced a new public content policy that lays out a framework for how partners and third parties can access user-posted content on its site." The post explains that more and more companies are using unsavory means to access user data in bulk, including Reddit posts. Once a company gets this data, there's no limit to what it can do with it. Reddit will continue to block "bad actors" that use unauthorized methods to get data, the company says, but it's taking additional steps to keep users safe from the site's partners.... Reddit still supports using its data for research: It's creating a new subreddit — r/reddit4researchers — to support these initiatives, and partnering with OpenMined to help improve research. Private data is, however, going to stay private.
If a company wants to use Reddit data for commercial purposes, including advertising or training AI, it will have to pay. Reddit made this clear by saying, "If you're interested in using Reddit data to power, augment, or enhance your product or service for any commercial purposes, we require a contract." To be clear, Reddit is still selling users' data — it's just making sure that unscrupulous actors have a tougher time accessing that data for free and researchers have an easier time finding what they need.
And finally, there's some court action, according to the Register. Reddit "was sued by an unhappy advertiser who claims that internet giga-forum sold ads but provided no way to verify that real people were responsible for clicking on them." The complaint [pdf] was filed this week in a U.S. federal court in northern California on behalf of LevelFields, a Virginia-based investment research platform that relies on AI. It says the biz booked pay-per-click ads on the discussion site starting September 2022... That arrangement called for Reddit to use reasonable means to ensure that LevelField's ads were delivered to and clicked on by actual people rather than bots and the like. But according to the complaint, Reddit broke that contract...
LevelFields argues that Reddit is in a particularly good position to track click fraud because it's serving ads on its own site, as opposed to third-party properties where it may have less visibility into network traffic... Nonetheless, LevelFields's effort to obtain IP address data to verify the ads it was billed for went unfulfilled. The social media site "provided click logs without IP addresses," the complaint says. "Reddit represented that it was not able to provide IP addresses."
"The plaintiffs aspire to have their claim certified as a class action," the article adds — along with an interesting statistic.
"According to Juniper Research, 22 percent of ad spending last year was lost to click fraud, amounting to $84 billion."
Bloomberg notes that already Reddit "has signed licensing agreements worth $203 million in total, with terms ranging from two to three years. The company generated about $20 million from AI content deals last quarter, and expects to bring in more than $60 million by the end of the year."
And elsewhere Bloomberg writes that Reddit "plans to expand its revenue streams outside of advertising into what Huffman calls the 'user economy' — users making money from others on the platform... " In the coming months Reddit plans to launch new versions of awards, which are digital gifts users can give to each other, along with other products... Reddit also plans to continue striking data licensing deals with artificial intelligence companies, expanding into international markets and evaluating potential acquisition targets in areas such as search, he said.
Meanwhile, ZDNet notes that this week a Reddit announcement "introduced a new public content policy that lays out a framework for how partners and third parties can access user-posted content on its site." The post explains that more and more companies are using unsavory means to access user data in bulk, including Reddit posts. Once a company gets this data, there's no limit to what it can do with it. Reddit will continue to block "bad actors" that use unauthorized methods to get data, the company says, but it's taking additional steps to keep users safe from the site's partners.... Reddit still supports using its data for research: It's creating a new subreddit — r/reddit4researchers — to support these initiatives, and partnering with OpenMined to help improve research. Private data is, however, going to stay private.
If a company wants to use Reddit data for commercial purposes, including advertising or training AI, it will have to pay. Reddit made this clear by saying, "If you're interested in using Reddit data to power, augment, or enhance your product or service for any commercial purposes, we require a contract." To be clear, Reddit is still selling users' data — it's just making sure that unscrupulous actors have a tougher time accessing that data for free and researchers have an easier time finding what they need.
And finally, there's some court action, according to the Register. Reddit "was sued by an unhappy advertiser who claims that internet giga-forum sold ads but provided no way to verify that real people were responsible for clicking on them." The complaint [pdf] was filed this week in a U.S. federal court in northern California on behalf of LevelFields, a Virginia-based investment research platform that relies on AI. It says the biz booked pay-per-click ads on the discussion site starting September 2022... That arrangement called for Reddit to use reasonable means to ensure that LevelField's ads were delivered to and clicked on by actual people rather than bots and the like. But according to the complaint, Reddit broke that contract...
LevelFields argues that Reddit is in a particularly good position to track click fraud because it's serving ads on its own site, as opposed to third-party properties where it may have less visibility into network traffic... Nonetheless, LevelFields's effort to obtain IP address data to verify the ads it was billed for went unfulfilled. The social media site "provided click logs without IP addresses," the complaint says. "Reddit represented that it was not able to provide IP addresses."
"The plaintiffs aspire to have their claim certified as a class action," the article adds — along with an interesting statistic.
"According to Juniper Research, 22 percent of ad spending last year was lost to click fraud, amounting to $84 billion."
Oh Reddit.. once a good resource.. (Score:5, Informative)
.. How you have fallen..
I mean, there are still some great communities and helpfull information there but the tide is shifting.
It used to be that for any obscure topic, like how to program a specific microcontroller, there would likely be a subreddit about such, and while to post volume on it might be low, it was usually followd by people who actually knew something.
The big subreddits were usually always bad though..
But now the people are instead on some discord server that is not searchable and the actual useful articles are published on many separate sites.
Specially the rise of discord has been bad for both Reddit and for actual access to information.
Re: (Score:3)
I agree. As Google search has gotten worse, for quite a while I would add "Reddit" to my Google searches and would find what I really wanted there. But now even those results are becoming less useful and relevant.
Re: Just Remember (Score:2)
Those are probably accurate numbers. Ever since Google announced people were adding reddit to search terms (trying to deflect from the fact that Google search sucks balls now) that likely prompted a huge increase in the number of bots spamming it.
Re: (Score:1)
To be fair to google, one thing reddit did cannibalize is a lot of "how to" pages.
Where before you'd have specialist communities posting on various arcane specialist topics with detailed discussion of really weird problem they ran into and then solving it as a group of interested people. Today same happens on reddit, whenever the problem isn't on banned topic list or hated by the woke. Because reddit just outcompeted specialist sites by concentrating most topics on one site instead. Instead of having severa
Reddit Joins The Business World (Score:2)
Now that Reddit has joined the business world we can expect all sorts of crazy news stories about them.
* Big Golden Parachute Payments for certain C-level executives *
* Interesting and possibly dubious financial statements that call into question their accounting proctices *
* Various auditors wanting to closely examine Reddit's userbase & ad revenue growth claims *
Yup, all the sorrid and tawdry stories that make big business what it is today.
It strains credulity (Score:2)
I have a lot of trouble believing that claimed increase in active uses is real. The quality has dropped. They had that API drama. They went iron fisted on their olunteer mods.
I doubt random people found articles about those things in the last year and thought. "Hey, I want to sign up for that!".
Re: (Score:2)
I created an account just this year. Now that Google is basically Reddit, I wanted to have some influence on the world. lol
Re: (Score:2)
There's a firefox mod that lets you filter google search results based on your desires. I see no reddit hits. The quality has gone up.
Re: (Score:1)
You just add "-site:reddit.com" to your searches when you want to exclude reddit. No addon necessary.
Most people seem to forget that you can use boolean operators. Minus followed by terms will exclude said terms. Command "site:" will search only that site. And combining both will search everywhere but that site.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually quite believable - if they are comparing recent usage with the period during the protests.
Reddit is classist, corrupt and overmoderated (Score:1)
it's pointless having a conversation on reddit unless you stick to the program as the unaccountable and abusive mods will censor any and all comments they disagree with and work to ban users they label as 'unpleasant', for instance, just try posts anything controversial to r/crontroversy or anything unpopular to r/unpopular and see what happens to your post. Don't complain or they will use that as an excuse to label you a malcontent and a troublemaker
reddit is a corporate tools used to control we the people
Re: (Score:1)
And no real discussion of the news allowed on r/news
And no real discussion of politics allowed on r/politics
And no real discussion of Ukraine allowed on r/Ukraine.
Re: (Score:1)
It's just like Slashdot, where if you don't suck off China and bow before the golden calf of climate change you get modded -1 troll.
News flash little fucktards: if your "science" can't stand up to criticism without banning anyone who disagrees with you your "science" is bullshit and you're a chickenshit.
In other news, the Internet interprets censorship as a service outage and routes around it. Probably explains why Slashdot is an abandoned ghost town just like Reddit.
Clicks are ads done wrong (Score:1)
Clicks is wrong way to sell ads. They should be on the same footing as other forms of advertising. Sell the context space.
Get rid of tracking.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm also curious about "22% of ad revenue is lost to click fraud." Lost to whom? Does this mean that the ad purchaser is paying Google or whomever for not real clicks? Isn't this a risk for Google and their ilk if ad purchasers decide to cut their spending by 22%?
April Fool's (Score:2)
Remember, censorship on Reddit was considered such an impossible future that one of their April Fool's jokes was to say they were giving mods the ability to delete comments.
Many years later Reddit censored that very blog post so people wouldn't be able to see how things have changed.
https://web.archive.org/web/20... [archive.org]
Slow sanitation (Score:2)
My anti-predictions:
- Slow sanitation - Expect Reddit to slowly sanitize its content, mod ban users, use AI sentiment analysis to autoflag and autoblock comments.
- Reddit-kids - Self explanatory
- Mass purges of users
- Mass deleting of comments and posts flagged as anything other that 'videos of cats and puppies'
- The Reddit user base becoming more and more of a certain age or older and that age increasing every year. Facebook has this already for a decade.
Is this the domino theory of internet portals that