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Reddit is profitable for the first time ever, with nearly 100 million daily users (www.theverge.com)

submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Reddit’s advertising revenue grew to $315.1 million, while “other” revenue reached $33.2 million on account of “data licensing agreements signed earlier this year.” Both Google and OpenAI have cut deals with Reddit to train their AI models on its posts.

In a letter to shareholders, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman attributed the recent increase in users to the platform’s AI-powered translation feature. Reddit started letting users translate posts into French last year before expanding to Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and German. Now, Huffman says Reddit plans to expand translation to over 30 countries through 2025.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I'm not expecting a big exodus, but rather a slow decline in both the number of users and their engagement. With a few peaks here and there that seem to revert the downwards trend, but each peak being smaller than the one before.

They won't be leaving for the same reason as most people here did, pissed at the IPO-related changes (such as killing 3rd party apps). It'll be more like "...meh, why would I check Reddit? There's better stuff elsewhere." We can already see the decline of the content quality in Reddit now; it'll get only worse over time.

I think that most will end in Discord. Some in Bluesky, and some will simply touch grass. Conservatives might end in ~~Minitrue~~ "truth social" or crap like that.

Facebook might perhaps absorb some of the former Reddit users. It feels disgusting for the privacy conscious, but for them it'll be a simple matter of not finding interesting stuff in Reddit.

The same applies to Reddit's liquid profit - for now, that value extraction still creates a small peak on raw profit, to the point that the bottom line became positive; later on the peak will barely reach the surface; later on, value extraction will be necessary to avoid making the bottom line too negative.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

This sounds familiar, almost as if history could perhaps, maybe, just possibly... repeat itself? Nah! (says spez)

People will follow the content creators indeed. Right now I'm not sure where they went though. The last I looked, it was basically nowhere, though to the extent that it was anything I thought it was X (even if via a temporary Mastodon intermediate). Musk fed Huffman bad info, which the Musk himself was not doing (or rather, the circumstances were entirely opposite - a public company going private rather than one attempting to make the polar opposition transition), and Huffman was dumb enough to fall for it, then Musk rakes in the rewards for his dirty deed.

Nowadays - or perhaps soon - as you said it might be Bluesky. So trading one corporate landlord for another, but it makes sense - the content creators will go wherever their audience is, and then the latter will in turn mindlessly follow the hoarde, but with an enormous delay measured in high number of months to even years. Plus, content creators need revenue to survive, e.g. how many videos is Ian Danskin (of Innuendo Studios) putting out these days? Then again, how many people especially younger ones even watch 20-30 minute long "video essays", rather than TikTok(-style) short-form clips?

All the rest: yup.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

This sounds familiar, almost as if history could perhaps, maybe, just possibly… repeat itself? Nah! (says spez)

Digg, right? Yeah. Perhaps spez even knew that it would repeat, but was smart (and shitty) enough to jump off the ship before it happened.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

Definitely Reddit's buildup was smart. The transition to profitability not so much. Although we'll see.

Man, remember all those who kept arguing against it? I would say "Reddit is dying", and these new accounts that had never visited my sub before we decided it should go dark suddenly appeared and started talking crap about anyone who criticized Reddit. That should have been a smoking gun alone for people to realize what was going on. But instead, people just said "yup, that's Reddit for you". Which extremely unfortunately... they were right, bc that is what it had become by that time.

i.e., spez didn't kill Reddit by denying the usage of third-party apps - that was merely the final nail in the coffin for many of us, topping off a process that had begun several years earlier.