Comment by VoidWhisperer
2 years ago
Wow, reddit found a way to make themselves even less useful somehow. After the API fiasco, that seemed like it'd be pretty hard to do.
2 years ago
Wow, reddit found a way to make themselves even less useful somehow. After the API fiasco, that seemed like it'd be pretty hard to do.
But, apparently, they did finally find a way to make money.
>But, apparently, they did finally find a way to make money.
The most recent 10-K financial results 2024-03-31 (filed 2024-05-08) shows they actually lost money: https://www.sec.gov/edgar/browse/?CIK=1713445
(For 2024-Q1, Reddit lost -$575 million on revenue of $242 M.)
If the quoted "$60 million deal"[1] from Feb 2024 is accurate, that small amount from Google may not be enough for Reddit to turn a profit. It remains to be seen what the Q2 or Q3 financials will show.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=google+ai+deal+reddit
Wow, perhaps I’m naive but what the hell are they spending over $800M a year on? That seems an obscene amount for a glorified message board.
I just read they have 2000 employees which is also puzzling to me
4 replies →
Barely enough to pay the CEO
If they kept their API open then by now the entirety of the site would be ai slop that was built with chatgpt and launched with the api.
Then again most of what that site does is just blend and regurgitate the information that's currently on it anyway.
Those AI bots would likely to be more intelligent commentors than Redditors
which is ironic because pre-AI every solid piece of obscure information and non-programming question usually had an answer on reddit, its an extremely valuable dataset looking back. but moving forward i think its only going to become less valuable and people will probably manually/custom-scrape all the questions out of worthwhile subreddits and open up their data for free
When I was young, my brother knew a guy who was really into movies. If you wanted to know about a movie you couldn't remember, you would go talk to that guy.
For a while, the internet had an end-run play that made that guy less useful. You can just go on the internet for obscure movie information, buddy.
But now it seems like knowing a movie guy is going to be the only way to get a real person's opinion on movies. The internet is about to forget everything without a profit motive and just start telling you that the latest product from a monolith corp like disney is the only movie worth watching. If someone scrapes all the useful movie opinions off of reddit and spends their time crafting it into a usable format, that guy's probably got a company. But not Bill. Bill's just a guy you can know or not know. You can't monetize knowing Bill. Sidenote that's probably why it irked me so bad when some bozo coined the phrase "social capital".
The API changes and these robots.txt were part of the same strategy - preventing third parties from scrapping their data and reducing the AI generated content that makes it into their data. So they can sell that data and make money.
> their data
Love how it's their data when it might make them money but not their data if they get sued.
That's fair. I agree with you that in some sense it is user data. And that Reddit is operating unethically.
Their dataset is already polluted with misinformation campaigns and shilling
The only things it does for me is forcing me to use Google as a large amount of the answers I need is on reddit.
So then this gambit worked. It sucks and I hate it. I will continue to use DDG/Bing first but it looks like I'll be hitting up Google more often too.
> The only things it does for me is forcing me to use Google
Startpage, Kagi and Lukol are 3 that source from Google. I imagine there are others.
That's what Google is paying them for :)