The recent Q2 2024 earnings call to investors by Reddit revealed a lot about its plans to add more to the company's revenue. It also revealed that it plans to push in more programs like search ads and paywalling subreddits and content. Currently, Reddit's ad placements are integrated into the home feed and made to look like native posts, and these also appear in the comments section.
Reddit to Add Search Ads, Paywall Subreddits and Content
In the latest Q2 2024 results announcement by Reddit, the company revealed that it is looking into new steps that would help it boost its revenue and prevent the platform from bleeding further in the market. It was revealed by Reddit COO Jen Wong that its current ad program is "light," and its CEO Steve Huffman claimed that search ads are an ideal one for the long term.
Moreover, the Reddit CEO and co-founder also revealed that paywalls are coming, saying that subreddits and content may be locked or only available to "private areas." Huffman claimed that the company is open to exploring new types of "use cases," suggesting the possibility of paywalls coming to the social networking platform.
Increasing Revenue is Reddit's Latest Goal
Despite this comment, Huffman still believes in the "altruistic, free version" of the platform, one that will still exist for users.
These latest suggestions from the COO and CEO only show that Reddit's current goal is to increase its revenue, with the company finding success as it reduced its net loss to $10.1 million from Q2 2023's $41.1 million loss.
Reddit and its Massive Changes
Over the past year, Reddit has been among the most controversial social networking platforms in the world because of the management's decision to paywall its API access, which was previously free. This led to many developers losing access to the API as they were given massive prices and later resulted in apps that have been essential to Redditors being shut down.
It led to significant protests on the platform where subreddits, including users and moderators, went "dark" and this meant there would be no activity from them.
Notably, this was the first step of the company to boost its monetization on the platform. It was later followed by reports of licensing the platform's content to companies for AI training, with Google among the first to jump into a deal.
Furthermore, Reddit also shortly announced its decision to go public, announcing its IPO and offering stocks to long-time Redditors, its staff, and more.
These steps were all for increasing the revenue of the news aggregator platform, but it seems to not be enough yet, as search ads and paywalled content have recently suggested by Reddit executives for its future.
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