Reddit CEO Demands Payment from Microsoft and Others for Data Use

TapTechNews August 1st news, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman recently stated that if companies like Microsoft want to continue scraping data from the website, they must pay. Previously, Reddit has reached agreements with Google and OpenAI.

Huffman pointed out that without these agreements, Reddit cannot control or understand how its data is used, which forces them to block those companies that are not willing to accept the data usage conditions. He specifically named three companies, Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity, saying they refused to negotiate and called blocking these companies very troublesome.

In recent months, Reddit has been increasing efforts to crack down on web crawlers. In early July, Reddit updated the robots.txt file and blocked unauthorized web crawlers. Then it was found that Reddit's content only appeared in Google's search results, while it could not be seen on other search engines such as Bing.

Huffman accused Microsoft of unauthorized use of Reddit's data to train AI and summarizing Reddit content in Bing search results, and even selling these data to other search engines through the Bing API. He also responded to Microsoft AI head Mustafa Suleyman's previous remarks about the Internet public data being free software, saying that companies like Microsoft think all content on the Internet is available for them to use for free, which is their true stance.

TapTechNews noted that in response to the disappearance of Reddit search results from Bing, Microsoft search chief Jordi Ribas said on social media that Reddit blocked Bing's crawler and favored another search engine, affecting the competition of Bing and Bing-based search engines. Microsoft spokeswoman Caitlin Roulston also said that the company respects the website's will that it does not want its content to be used in generative AI models.

Huffman emphasized the importance of paid agreements by taking OpenAI's SearchGPT as an example. Earlier this year, Reddit reached an agreement with OpenAI to allow SearchGPT to display Reddit content. Reddit spokesman Tim Rathschmidt said that none of the currently signed content licensing agreements involve exclusive data usage rights.

Reddit's approach of requiring payment is similar to that of traditional media publishers, who also hope to gain revenue from allowing content to be used in generative AI. Huffman believes that the traditional value exchange of search engines has changed, and search, summary, and training are merging, and the model of simply relying on scraping content for traffic is becoming blurred.