Inside Reddit's AI Partnerships
Reddit fought a messy war against AI data scrapers, but playing offense put the company in an enviable position. What are the lessons for publishers?
I'm freshly returned from ONA, the annual conference for the Online News Association, which was chock-full of sessions, workshops, and gossip on how the new industry is adapting to AI. While many of the insights I gained will trickle out in The Media Copilot newsletter in the coming weeks, I learned a lot about the big picture of how AI is chanting content strategy from Jonathan Flesher, VP of Business Development for Reddit.
In a session on Day 2 of the conference, Flesher shared a lot of tea on Reddit's content-licensing deals with OpenAI and Google. There's quite a bit to unpack, but before I get to that, a quick reminder that the new paywall starts today: Going forward, free subscribers get the Thursday newsletter (which includes the Chatbox news roundup) and The Media Copilot podcast, but my weekly Tuesday column and our Wednesday AI How-To's for journalists and PR pros both require a paid subscription. Get one now so you don't miss a beat, plus you'll get access to the full archive.
On Thursday, I'll be boarding another plane when I head to Columbia, MO, to visit the University of Missouri to help lead a workshop on how to use AI in reporting for the journalism school. And I've got my eye on Adobe Max in Miami next month. Who's got tips on the best airline credit card?
Finally, I've got the new iPhone 16. I wish I could say it was because I wanted to get the earliest possible look at Apple Intelligence — and it was — but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't influenced more by the simple fact of my iPhone 12 being on its last legs. I'd have upgraded even if they'd said, "Yeah, we just put some new colors on last year's phone."
I know that seemed like an innocuous comment about my smartphone, but it's really a teaser for the next Media Copilot podcast where I talk to Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal. With the help of WSJ engineers, Joanna recently created Joannabot, an AI that can answer questions about the iPhone 16, based on her notes, chunks of her coverage, and a whole lot of spec sheets. Joanna and I talk about her creation, what chatbots might mean for media outlets, and where AI hardware is going. Follow the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to make sure you can hear the convo as soon as it drops this Friday.
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How Reddit's Aggressive AI Strategy Paid Off
When Reddit announced it was going to severely limit access to its API — effectively cutting off third-party developers from creating their own app experiences around Reddit's content — the company caught hell. The internet lit up with rage, and many of the site's subreddits went dark in protest. Some questioned whether or not Reddit could survive the apocalypse it brought onto itself.
In hindsight, Reddit's move looks downright prescient if not brilliant. As the company said repeatedly, Reddit was responding to the sudden massive increase in web scraping that was an integral part of the rise of AI. The large language models that power generative AI systems like ChatGPT needed vast quantities of data to train on, and Reddit had a lot of the best kind: original, human generated, and covering every subject imaginable. Plus it was "publicly available."
But Reddit brought down the hammer in the name of protecting its intellectual property. It cut off its API from anyone who wouldn't pay, and by the fall of 2023 there was talk of the site even removing itself from Google Search — if it had to.
It didn't have to. Reddit weathered the storm of criticism and now has deals in place with both OpenAI and Google to allow them to train their AI models on the company's content and surface it in AI-based answers, and each is worth tens of millions of dollars. Coincidence or not, Reddit has benefited from Google's recent changes to search, with links to Reddit posts appearing higher in search, and more often.
What the Media Can Learn from Reddit
Jonathan Flesher, Reddit's VP of Business Development, spoke at the ONA conference on Thursday to talk about those deals, how the company negotiated them, and what they'll mean going forward to Reddit, its partners, and its users. I think the publishing world can learn a lot from the company's move and the perspective that informed it.
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