Part of the problem is that both publishers and Reddit have historically depended on regular Google search traffic, but in most cases, the current status quo treats being surfaced as one of the so-called blue links and being part of AI Overviews as a package deal.
You can add Reddit CEO Steve Huffman to the growling list of publishers, platforms and others who are frustrated with the state of Google search and AI Overviews. "People don't want a summary of Reddit;
Alphabet’s Google pays Reddit around $60 million a year to scrape conversation data from the social media site. That could change.
On Friday, a judge largely denied a motion to dismiss from a web scraper, SerpApi, which is accused of conspiring with Perplexity AI to illegally scrape copyrighted Reddit content from Google search results.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said his company has to find ways to work around changes at Google, which is delivering less traffic than in the past.
Despite Reddit delivering an objectively solid Q2, its stock cratered, in part because of search-related headwinds and low referral traffic.
Federal court dismissed Google's DMCA scraping lawsuit against SerpApi, ruling Google lacks copyright over its own search results - with major implications for Reddit too.
Reddit just posted a beat-and-raise quarter yet its stock is cratering while Alphabet surges, and the reason why reveals a fault line running through every social media investment thesis right now.
Reddit's revenue climbed 61% to $804.9 million in the second quarter, comfortably beating analyst expectations. Yet shares fell more than 20% after the earnings report, as CEO Steve Huffman used
Reddit can proceed with a lawsuit alleging that Perplexity and data scraper SerpApi wrongly obtained copyrighted Reddit posts from Google's search results.
Reddit's reported review of its Google AI partnership highlights growing publisher concerns that AI-powered search is changing the economics of web traffic.
Reddit's financial situation is looking good but uncertainty about its relationship to Google and the new AI-ified web are stirring market concerns.