Reddit’s Expansion Hinges on AI Translation and Sprinkling in some Google Magic

Reddit’s top brass has upvoted a global expansion.

In a CNBC interview on Wednesday, the chief operating officer of Reddit, the world’s newest publicly-traded social media company, listed overseas markets like India and Brazil as one of the ways the “Front Page of the Internet” intends to chase growth. 

Of course every company wants more revenue, but for Reddit, which went public in March, the clock is ticking as the company has never turned an annual profit.

r/Profitability

Sure, it took Uber 15 years to make more money than it spends, but Reddit is already almost 20 years old. It looks like the company is headed in the right direction, as it reported its first-ever quarterly profit in the third quarter of this year. But it needs to keep that wheel turning.

AI is a big part of how Reddit plans to monetize the endless array of subreddits (i.e. forums) on its platform. For one thing, Reddit has agreed to license out its content to Google for training purposes, so it’s something of a data supplier. But it also plans to use AI to expand its user base and, consequently, the money it makes from advertisers:

• COO Jen Wong told CNBC that Reddit sees huge growth opportunities in countries including India and Brazil. Wong said just half of Reddit users reside outside the US, compared with other social media companies whose user bases are more reflective of global demographics. 
• Wong said Reddit plans to use generative AI to autotranslate large swaths of the site, opening it up to more global users so they can read about the endlessly entertaining interpersonal dilemmas of Redditors on the other side of the world.

Googleception: As it searches for revenue, Reddit is also thinking about expanding its search feature, Wong said, surfacing posts and forums that users may miss otherwise. Reddit is already doing pretty well traffic-wise because Google searches began surfacing Reddit posts more frequently this year, so layering in a better search function inside its own platform could expand the search utility of its product.