IT Home reported on February 18 that according to Bloomberg yesterday, the social platform Reddit will reach a data licensing agreement with an unnamed "large AI company" to allow the latter to access its user-generated content platform. The annual value of the agreement is approximately $60 million (IT House note: currently about 4.).CNY3.2 billion), but the details are subject to change as Reddit's go-to plan is still being developed.
Previously, most AI companies trained data from open networks without permission. However, the legality of this practice has been questioned, forcing these companies to seek more formal data**. It's unclear which company Reddit has the deal with, but the amount of the deal is significantly higher than the $5 million annual fee OpenAI pays for data for news publishers. According to the New York Times, Apple is also seeking multi-year agreements worth "at least $50 million" with major news companies.
Last October, Reddit was rumored to be threatening to cut off access to Google and Bing search crawlers unless a data licensing agreement could be reached with an AI company.
Whether the rumors are true or not, Reddit has indeed shown a tough negotiation stance before. Last year, a change in third-party API access pricing led to the retirement of popular Reddit app developers, triggering the largest event in Reddit's history. However, Reddit eventually managed to resist the pressure and did not change the established policy.
Bloomberg reported that Reddit's year-over-year revenue was up 20% by the end of 2023, but it was still 200 million short of the $1 billion target it set two years ago. Reddit reportedly plans to go public in March with a valuation target of $5 billion, halving the $10-$15 billion valuation target it had when it last applied for listing in 2021, when plans to go public were put on hold due to a market downturn.