According to three people with knowledge of the situation, Google and the social media platform Reddit have reached an agreement to make their content available for training the search engine giant's artificial intelligence models.
One of the sources claims that the agreement with Alphabet-owned Google is worth aroun $60 million annually.
The agreement highlights Reddit's efforts to increase revenue in the face of fierce advertising competition from platforms like TikTok and Facebook, which is preparing for a high-profile stock market launch.
Reddit announced last year that access to its application programming interface(API), which is how it distributes its content, would be charged to businesses. This deal with Google is it’s first rumored deal with a significant AI company.
Reddit, a San Francisco-based company that has been looking at a stock float for more than three years, is getting ready to make its initial public offering file this week, informing potential IPO investors of its financials for the first time.
According to two sources, the filing might be accessible as early as Thursday. According to Reuters, the company wants to sell about 10% of its shares in the offering after being valued at around $10 billion in a funding round in 2021.
Since Pinterest floated its shares in 2019, Reddit's stock market launch would be the first major social media company to go public.
In recent months, AI model creators have been busy negotiating with content owners in an effort to expand the scope of their training data beyond sizable internet scrapes. As many content creators have claimed that their work was used without their consent, this practice is fraught with potential copyright problems.
