Reddit is planning to introduce a paywall this year, CEO Steve Huffman said during a videotaped Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on Thursday.
Huffman previously showed interest in potentially introducing a new type of subreddit with “exclusive content or private areas” that Reddit users would pay to access.
When asked this week about plans for some Redditors to create “content that only paid members can see,” Huffman said:
It’s a work in progress right now, so that one’s coming… We’re working on it as we speak.
When asked about “new, key features that you plan to roll out for Reddit in 2025,” Huffman responded, in part: “Paid subreddits, yes.”
Reddit’s paywall would ostensibly only apply to certain new subreddit types, not any subreddits currently available.
Reddit executives also discussed how they might introduce more ads into the social media platform. The push for ads follows changes to Reddit’s API policy that, in part, led to the closing of most third-party apps used for accessing Reddit. Reddit makes most of its revenue from ads and can only show ads on its native apps and website.
Reddit started testing ads in comments last year, with COO Jen Wong saying during an AMA that such ads are in “about 3 percent of inventory.” The executive hinted at that percentage growing. Wong also shared hopes that contextual advertising, or ads being shown based on the content surrounding them, will be a “bigger part of” Reddit’s business by 2026.
You must log in or register to comment.
There’s nothing on Reddit anymore. It’s really unfortunate but I don’t see how this is going to help them regain any consistent user base.
Looks like I dropped Reddit at just the right time.
What I find hilarious is all these companies doing this shit after all the advancements in programming languages and paradigms in the last few years.
Thanks to tools like Node.js, React, Flask, Reflex, OpenAPI Gen, GoLang, and more, people that are fed-up and have the know-how can stand up competing technology in record time.
I look forward to see what comes out of this corporate power grab. Hopefully there’s not a lot of pain and suffering alkng the way.
Reddit: Here’s another reason not to use our site.
Users: Ok bye.
I feel like this is gonna be a cash cow for reddit, just not in a way spez can just openly talk about.
A huge portion of reddit is OnlyFans promos. Reddit is making zero off of all this, because traditional advertising doesn’t want to associate themselves with porn. A bunch of these “paid subreddits” will basically be a reddit’s attempt to compete with OnlyFans.
I honestly think it’ll work. There’s a lot of money in porn.n
i hope there is a mass migration here
Do it, please, the subreddits need to migrate here
More ads? There’s already a bunch of them mixed with posts and comments. What more, force people to watch an ad before loading pages?
There are ads in comments now?
Yeah, people like me and I assume you, who used to browse reddit via a third party app or with RES + an adblocker on pc did not see it but it’s a bit insanely how much ads there’s already on reddit right now. I migrated to GNU and firefox last week and forgot to add the extensions as I was just looking for some information in the Endeavour subreddit and I was shocked at the state of “default” reddit… I’m glad I left and I hope most of the userbase will…
r/spezholedesign
It does seem like a lot of ads for “3% of inventory”. I can’t ever see a reason to pay for a subreddit.
I’m not on Reddit much these days but every time I am and I see threads with people discussing these Reddit policy changes Lemmy gets mentioned. Usually with people complaining they already tried or couldn’t figure it out or that it isn’t good enough…
I think as the enshittification marches on they’ll be some more exodus from Reddit but generally I think everyone is just getting used to all online social media being a total corporate disaster.
Lemmy was hard to use a year ago or so.
Honestly, I was just giving up going here, lemmy is very complicated, also I miss my beautiful snoo :(
I just joined yesterday because of this article. Honestly I feel like I’m using Apollo to access Reddit again. My Reddit account was 12 years old and I deleted it.
This is a cool guide for starting https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/get-started
Thank you! I literally signed up 30 mins ago after seeing Lemmy mentioned a few times on Reddit. I’m at the ‘what the heck is this, where am I’ stage but feel like I understand how it works a bit better now!
Oh god, you’ve out me down a rabbit hole. Thank you!
Welcome friend. :)
Thank you!
It’s crazy how everything slowly turns into shit in the end
Ok tidy up this place. We have visitors coming soon.
Still no frictionless account migration…
What’s to migrate other than your name? My reddit usage was limited to lurking so I genuinely don’t know.
History, reputation, relationships (this a nuch bigger problem on mastofon) (yes migration as a lurker is easy)
The announcement is why I created a username here. I doubt I’m coming alone.
Welcome! We can definitely still use a few more people, especially if they’re willing to contribute to content.
well Hexbear is just about gone so that should help
great timing for them to lose both of their domains
“more ads” as if it isn’t already as flooded as meta sites.
I can’t imagine what sub-reddits they think people would willingly participate in that are paid-only. Decreasing visibility and potential participation group automatically makes those worse in most cases.
Porn?
Yeah, actually. I could see them taking on OnlyFans if they wanted to. But I think they want to be more mainstream than that.
