Reddit CEO Steve Huffman claimed some significant changes could come to the platform and the company would begin to test the AI-powered search results, wrapping up its second earnings call as a public company.
Reddit CEO reveals AI search feature and paid subreddit to launch latest this year
Huffman said, “Later this year we will begin testing new search results pages powered by AI to summarise and recommend content, helping users dive deeper into products shows, and games and discover new communities on Reddit”. It was not confirmed by him about the beginning of the test however it was said that both first-party and third-party models would be used.
It was noted by Huffman that search on the platform has “gone unchanged for a long time” but it leads to a significant opportunity to bring in new users. Search could become a significant source of advertising revenue for the company he added.
Furthermore, a non-advertising source of revenue also revealed by him, he suggested that the company might look forward to its experiment with paywalled subreddits as it looks to monetize new features. He thinks that the existing, altruistic, free version of Reddit will continue to exist and grow and thrive just the way it has, he said, “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”.
However, there are players in the ecosystem who have not gotten the proper use of Reddit’s content and have not become transparent yet, monitoring these instances to protect content the access has blocked will be able to maintain the user’s privacy. Where the data is going how it’s being used and for what, these statements by Huffiman show how they are aiming for safety and security first and want to know everything as the process goes.
The company has been keeping its eye on determining the ways to expand its business since it was going public this year. Moreover, it had struck between the multi-million-dollar licensing deals with Google and OpenAI has already blocked the search engines that aren’t paying the company. Therefore only those relevant sources are available and joined together who have an official name for a search engine.