On Tuesday, Reddit’s co-founder and CEO, Steve Huffman, wrapped up its second earnings call as a public company, hinting at some new changes to the platform. He revealed that the company plans to test AI-powered search result pages later this year to summarize and recommend content.
He said that “this will help users dive deeper into products, shows, games and discover new communities on Reddit.” He revealed that it will use both first-party and third-party models, though he didn’t specify when the tests would begin.
Huffman said that searches on Reddit have “gone unchanged for a long time,” but they can bring in new users and become a source of advertising revenue in the future.
He also hinted that the company might also experiment with paywalled Subreddits to monetize new features.
Huffman said, “I think the existing, altruistic, free version of Reddit will continue to exist and grow and thrive just the way it has.” He further added, “But now 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.”
Although a Reddit spokesperson has refused to comment on this, we know that the company has long been planning to expand its business since going public this year. The multi-million-dollar licensing deals with Google and OpenAI are a good example of this.
Along with that, Reddit also blocked search engines, asking them to pay to search the site.
In the earnings call, AI was the common topic, and Reddit mentioned its AI-powered language translation feature, revealing plans to expand the feature to German, Spanish, and Portuguese.
The earnings report revealed that there were 342.3 million weekly active users, and the revenue was $281.2 million.
