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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 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

258 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] 10 points 3 days ago (2 children)

In order for lemmy (or any alternative) to really take off, efforts need to be made to mass migrate content. The biggest inhibitor of adoption is the lack of communities, and the user submitted info backing them. Not only would it be beneficial for alternatives to have this on their servers, efforts should be made to index and back up the mountain of how to and general hyper specific sub reddit information for the good of society. The world already lost so much during the last purge of users comments and posts, further enshitification of reddit will only lead to more getting lost. Are any groups working to scrape all (or the most important data) from reddit and break it out in a searchable format here?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago

That is something that some tech savy Lemmy users could already easily do. I repost stuff from all over the web. But some systematic preservation of good old subreddits aught to be automated.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

Well Reddit started off with a bunch of sock puppet accounts to make the site look larger than it was. Now they have bots doing that so when you refresh Reddit it’s always new. Back when it was good there was a point where you’d just run out of Reddit. It was a meme. They figured out how to stop that feeling.

But that feeling is good! We will have to get used to the fact that real human sites don’t constantly update if we want nice things.