Paywalled subreddits are ????? ?????? ????? ??????coming this year, confirmed by Reddit CEO Steve Huffman.
In a prerecorded video AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Friday answering redditors' questions about the company's Q4 2024 earnings, Reddit executives shared some more information about its plans to monetize the social media forum.
Back in August 2024, Huffman hinted that paywalled subreddits were on the way, saying, "we will unlock the door for new use cases, new types of subreddits that can be built that may have exclusive content or private areas, things of that nature."
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When asked about the progress of monetizing subreddits during Friday's video, Huffman said, "it's a work in progress right now so that one's coming. We're working on it as we speak." In a separate question about key features for 2025, Huffman confirmed that users can expect to see the introduction of paid subreddits this this year.
Reddit had remained a pretty consistent platform since its inception in 2005. But its IPO last year triggered some significant changes in an effort to increase shareholder value. The most notorious one was hiking up its API fees, effectively shutting popular third party apps like Apollo. Reddit also made licensing deals with Google and OpenAI in exchange for letting their web crawlers access the site.
There weren't many details about what a paid subreddit model might look like, but as mentioned in the AMA, the platform is actively looking for other ways to bring in revenue. Huffman also mentioned the introduction of a marketplace for buying products through the platform, though he described it as more of a longterm plan.
COO Jen Wong also chimed in about the importance of licensing deals for AI chatbots like Google Gemini and ChatGPT, in addition to "marketing intelligence and social listening" customers. Reddit also has its own AI chatbot called Reddit Answers which sources information from the Reddit community.
All that's to say, expect more changes to come from Reddit, and expect them to come with a cost.