Reddit says it's made $203M so far licensing its data
Reddit says it's made $203M so far licensing its data
In its IPO prospectus, Reddit revealed that it has contractual agreements to license its data worth a combined $203 million.
Our data, you mean?
well, not mine. i used a script to replace all of my comments with gibberish before i deleted them and then my account. if they went back and restored my comments, then all they'll get is comments full of gibberish, especially since i overwrote them 3 times before deleting them, just in case they tried to roll back to the previous version.
have fun with that!
Yeah.....all that comment data isn't really that large. They'll have backups captured for likely several years back. All you can view is the info on the current live servers. You might have kept them from getting like 3 months worth of your comments at best.
I did the same, but we're both fools if we think reddit didn't keep every character we typed (yet alone submitted) in a private, proprietary database.
We weren't paid for our data. We were given access to a website free of charge. The consent we gave was supposed to be for the operation of the website, not for training AI.
They should fucking pay us.
Me too. Feelin' mighty fine about that decision now. Long Live Lemmy
Our data
Correct, our data.
- Spez
In other news, spez's compensation from reddit last year was $193 million, and it's COO got a cool $93 million.
C'mon, spez, tell us again how horrible it's been that reddit's never made a profit.
Just saw this on yours truly. Fucking hilarious considering they had the balls to IPO with that sack of rocks weighing down the entire company.
So Reddit charges users to create content (paid premium or by showing ads). And then it sells that content.
Making money both going and coming.
And it also asks reddit users to invest in reddit
loool
I wonder if there is any legal standing for users to sue Reddit for a fair share of those profits. That’d be nice if it could happen. But i suspect, probably not.
Their TOS says they own your content in any current or future formats or derivative works.
I’d say Reddit would win.
Their TOS says they own your content in any current or future formats or derivative works.
Their ToS could say they own you and your children and grandchildren, but that doesn't make it enforceable.
If I post a frame from the movie Akira on Reddit would any reasonable person suggest that they own not only that frame, but also the entire movie that it came from as a derivative work? There is a glut of second-hand data just like that all over Reddit, Twitter, and every other social media network, and I'm willing to bet that's also part of what's being sold.
But hey... I'm not saying you're wrong, just that the idea that they automatically "own" the things that people post on their website is ridiculous. It's a bit like UPS or FedEx saying they own the contents of your package while delivering it.
The TOS shouldn't hold up in court. A contract must be an exchange of two things, eg money for a product or service. You can't say "Our service is free of charge!!!" And then in the fine print "(((But also you agree to give us everything we can take free of charge)))".
The issue is how everyone does it. Facebook and Google started when data had no value, now they're amongst the wealthiest businesses in the world. Now, Microsoft have joined in, *even though you already pay for their products and services anyway!"
However, the other aspect is that everyone is a victim. Lawmakers are the victim. They still haven't quite yet realised how much is being taken from them (at least $50 per year, probably more like $1,000 per year if not more for prominent figures) but they are still being abused.
It's like that form of bank fraud, where the criminal takes pennies from accounts, hoping the user won't notice and the bank will write it off. Do it to enough people and enough times and you can make millions. They do this to everyone and they make billions.
Either the data is public domain and they don't have to pay for it, but also cannot charge others for it, or the data is private and they must pay the author a fair share.
Yeah, probably not. When you sign up and agreed to their ToS, they don't "own" your content, but you grant them a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use it without compensation.
From their ToS:
Any ideas, suggestions, and feedback about Reddit or our Services that you provide to us are entirely voluntary, and you agree that Reddit may use such ideas, suggestions, and feedback without compensation or obligation to you
Source: A pretty good post on r/HFY, though it is on Reddit, so don't click it if you don't want to :P
But how many TOS have been shot down because they over reach? I don’t know. You’re probably right. It it’s still fun to imagine.
There is legal standing, IMO. You can't take something without consideration, and access to the website was granted free of charge while the data collection was squirrelled away in the fine print. That isn't a lawful contract, the fine print is for technicalities about the main transaction of X in exchange for Y. You can't say "we'll give you X for free!!!” then sneak into the fine print "(((you also give us Y for free)))". The structure is clearly deceptive in a manner that is designed to prevent a fair assessment of the value being exchanged.
Insurers have to provide a "key facts page" where they summarise in plain English what you're paying for. The fine print gives the detail, but the front page is still "we give you X in exchange for Y".
You can't build a car without paying for the nuts and bolts. Tech companies have placed themselves amongst the wealthiest businesses in the world without paying for the nuts and bolts we provide.
Hell, even Microsoft is in on it now, even though you pay for Windows and Office 365!
Next question then: how do we mobilize into a class action against Reddit and google and Microsoft and whomever else?
... and thats why Wikipedia is non-profit.
Seeing human (even shitpost) achievements get monetized (in the most sucky manner) one by one is sad af.
So just enough to cover what it payed the CEO last year? ($192 million)
Lmao the ratfuck CEO is making his money alright. What a little weaseling coward. He spend so long jealous of his co-founders who got paid and left early, that he probably sees this as his gold parachute.
I hope my fuck Spez comments are useful.
Now AIs will fuck Spez for all eternity.
Millennia from now Fuckspez! will be the standard greeting between all sentient species in the galactic federation. It will be even used in machine code as a handshake for establishing initial contact between two subspace relays.
Blow me
Reddit says it's made $203M so far licensing
itsour dataFixed that for them.
There's your "tragedy of the commons" fallacy on a stick, folks - the proles where managing reddit so well that huffman had to break it in order to make it more vulnerable to the parasites.
It's data?! You mean our data
This is helpful of them, once the EU court fines them, we can quickly calculate how much that will be.
These are totally the signs of a stable and profitable company.
I wonder if they will ever consider paying the users for the content they provide that constitutes "its" data. 🤔
Pay? They are trying to "stonk" Reddit users by asking them to buy stock for the IPO which screams "We want your data and your money!".
Yeah. They are giving the users the "privilege" to buy shares at the open market rate. Not even at discounted rates. Again US only. What about the others? They just give their data I suppose.
They said they'll be allowing users to cash out Karma.
The users get a service that costs hundreds of millions to maintain for free.
And no one is forcing them to post valuable content without compensation.This was my attitude until reddit took away my app. Now the site is the poster child for enshitification
Where's my cut?
what, you didn't get the email offering the special stock price?
Yeah I got it, but unfortunately I don't want to put money into Reddit. I heard some early adaptors got cash bonus instead, I'm very jealous
A good reminder to go back and edit all your comments to [removed] if you didn't do so when you first left.
I did, and then also deleted my accounts. I can't believe how much bot content is on there now.
Spez will be happy to know his payout is covered, company is still going to be broke though.
How? They're under heavy scrutiny from the FTC over the $60M/month Google deal. Where did the extra $140M come from?
Probably doesn't matter, but this is why I deleted my account instead of just locking it up.
With google being the partner i bet the deal wont mention they cant use older backups of reddit that they most certainly have.
This is why we need better data laws in the US. If I want everything I've ever said on your site to disappear both instantly and forever, I should have that option.
I'm sure you're right about that. All parties involved are scumbags, after all.
For everybody who thinks we should get paid for our data, you may want to consider the Data Dividend Project:
Access from your Country was disabled by the administrator.
Damn, might be a US-only thing then.
"its data".
Ah yes... of course.
Good thing they monetized their API.
They need to pay the users with that money
Delusional comment
Or genius. New company idea. Sell data from the start and share revenue with contributors.
who knew my old shitposts are worth that much
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Earlier this week, Bloomberg and Reuters reported that a “large unnamed AI company” — possibly Google — had entered into a licensing agreement worth about $60 million on an annualized basis.
“[Our] data APIs are able to provide real-time access to evolving and dynamic topics such as sports, movies, news, fashion, and the latest trends,” the prospectus continues.
“We believe that Reddit’s massive corpus of conversational data and knowledge will continue to play a role in training and improving large language models.
Content producers, from stock media libraries to news publishers, are increasingly turning to data licensing agreements with AI vendors as chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini threaten to sap traffic.
Vendors, in turn, have been spurred to pursue licensing agreements as they face a deluge of lawsuits alleging that they have no legal justification for training their models on data without permission or payment.
OpenAI, for one, has agreements in place with image gallery Shutterstock as well as publishers including Axel Springer, the owner of Politico and Business Insider.
The original article contains 564 words, the summary contains 172 words. Saved 70%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
time to go edit all my old comment with random garbage generated by chatgpt
It is probably way too late for that to make any difference, no?
Probably, but one thing I learned too late in my life is that by being cynical you're assured to never get anything done
$203M in one licenced transaction. Selling their data to Google. No one is falling for this shit.
Reddit doesn't own that data. The community owns it.
Maybe there's something in the terms of service but that shouldn't hold water because nobody has ever read that document.
Literally the only way they could become profitable.
I'm honestly more upset at this deal (I think it was google?) than the CEO pay thing, which is all stock options and mostly ragebait.
I expect to see them last 3-5 years and get bought out by some bit tech firm, all current execs take their payouts, sell their shares and retire.