Reddit, a well-known American Internet forum, has previously reached an agreement with artificial intelligence developers such as Google. Google pays Reddit $60 million per year to obtain content authorization and can use the forum's posts to train AI models.
However, Reddit believes that the existing fixed-price licensing model is not very good. A Reddit executive who did not want to be named said that the company is currently renegotiating with Google. The focus of this negotiation includes Google helping the forum gain more users and Reddit’s desire to modify the licensing model.
At present, Google provides a large amount of natural search traffic to the forum. However, most users will leave after clicking on the post and will not register an account and post. This will cause the Reddit forum to lose too many users and content.
Reddit hopes to solve this problem to get more users and more posts, and more posts are training materials needed by AI companies such as Google, which will also help Reddit continue to increase its value and gain more revenue.
Another change in the licensing model is that Reddit wants to pay based on the quality of the content:
Reddit executives believe that the current terms of cooperation with AI companies do not reflect the value of the forum data to artificial intelligence companies. Reddit has an advantage over most platforms, and its posts and other data are very useful for artificial intelligence models.
In this chaotic internet age, Reddit posts are posted by real people (Note: OpenAI’s Sam Altman previously complained about too many robot posts on the forum), the content is carefully sorted by topic, and all rankings are based on a human voting system rather than an algorithm.
Data also shows that Reddit forum posts are the websites with the highest citation rate for Google searches for AI overview and Perplexity AI searches. Quoted Reddit posts often appear in Google AI overview, so Reddit believes that AI companies should pay for these citations.
So Reddit’s idea is to adopt a dynamic pricing model in future licensing agreements, where compensation is determined based on the usefulness or importance of content to the answers generated by AI tools, including networked search capabilities and citations for ChatGPT and other AI tools.
However, the negotiations have not yet been finalized at this stage. For Reddit, this should continue to increase revenue. However, for users, it may be psychologically uncomfortable for their posts to be sold to train AI models.