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Reddit plans to lock some content behind a paywall this year, CEO says | Reddit executives also discussed how they might introduce more ads into the social media platform (arstechnica.com)

submitted 6 days ago by ForgottenFlux to c/technology

259 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Reddit is planning to introduce a paywall this year, CEO Steve Huffman said during a videotaped Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on Thursday.

Huffman previously showed interest in potentially introducing a new type of subreddit with "exclusive content or private areas" that Reddit users would pay to access.

When asked this week about plans for some Redditors to create "content that only paid members can see," Huffman said:

It’s a work in progress right now, so that one’s coming... We're working on it as we speak.

When asked about "new, key features that you plan to roll out for Reddit in 2025," Huffman responded, in part: “Paid subreddits, yes.”

Reddit's paywall would ostensibly only apply to certain new subreddit types, not any subreddits currently available.

Reddit executives also discussed how they might introduce more ads into the social media platform. The push for ads follows changes to Reddit’s API policy that, in part, led to the closing of most third-party apps used for accessing Reddit. Reddit makes most of its revenue from ads and can only show ads on its native apps and website.

Reddit started testing ads in comments last year, with COO Jen Wong saying during an AMA that such ads are in “about 3 percent of inventory.” The executive hinted at that percentage growing. Wong also shared hopes that contextual advertising, or ads being shown based on the content surrounding them, will be a “bigger part of” Reddit’s business by 2026.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Youtube is probably the most difficult platform on the internet to replace. Video content delivery is extremely resource heavy and technically complicated, especially once you start to scale. Many, many competitors have attempted it over the years, and while some found their niche, none of them have achieved anywhere close to the scale of Youtube.

It took decades of Youtube to become profitable, only doing so after achieving mind-boggling economy of scale. The majority of humans on earth have used Youtube. About half of all (global) internet users use it monthly. I don't know if any other platform can claim stats like that.

Youtube is one of those platforms that only exists because it got a head start in the unique conditions of the early internet. I don't know if it's even possible to create a true competitor, though I could see multiple platforms taking over different niches.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

This is what people always seen to ignore about YouTube. It's not just another database frontend to use generated content. That is definitely part of it, but behind that is probably the largest public facing content library on the Internet with a full video recoding infrastructure attached. YouTube is the platform for which I understand that they need to monetize.

Sure, nowadays there's also tiktok as another big video service. But I like to think that YouTube is way bigger in most metrics.