Reddit Demands Usage-Based Payments from AI

18 Sep 2025 Reddit is back in talks with Google and reportedly OpenAI to renegotiate how its publicly posted content is licensed and monetized for AI training, according to Bloomberg reporting summarized by The Verge. After a reported $60 million-a-year data‑sharing deal with Google a year and a half ago, Reddit’s leadership wants more than cash: it wants help driving users back to Reddit after AI tools surface Reddit content and users leave, plus higher, potentially usage‑based payments for the data those platforms rely on. Executives are said to be exploring a dynamic‑pricing model that would pay more when Reddit content is demonstrably valuable to AI answers. Reddit argues its content is unusually high‑value for model training — candid, topically organized by subreddits and surface‑ranked by human votes — and that external citations (e.g., Perplexity, Google AI Overviews) show Reddit is frequently relied on. The negotiation underscores a wider tension: publishers and platforms supply training data for models that can then diminish the traffic and engagement that made that content valuable in the first place. Reddit’s push seeks not only bigger fees but terms that preserve the sites that generate the data AI companies need. Source