Final week, Reddit filed their S-1 to go public. A minimum of 10% of their income – about $60m – comes from promoting information to coach Massive Language Fashions. Reddit’s information gross sales income will seemingly be far more than 10% by the top of the yr. Quoting instantly :
We anticipate our rising information benefit and mental property to proceed to be a key aspect within the coaching of future LLMs.
This raises a elementary query : What if the income from information gross sales dwarfs the income from advertisements?
LLMs want information. They compress this it & reconstitute it to reply person queries. At Reddit, like many websites on the Web, the content material modifications typically. Customers need to search the info for product critiques, journey suggestions, info, & enjoyable (the newest memes). Google isn’t the one one after this information : OpenAI & different suppliers are additionally brokering direct offers with Web publishers.
As a result of the info must be contemporary, Google & others will proceed to pay for entry & probably more and more extra for exclusivity, low-latency, or information of a selected type that improves the accuracy of their fashions.
Information gross sales invert the enterprise mannequin of the Web.
As a substitute of Reddit constructing product experiences that create good promoting information to earn extra on advertisements, Reddit will launch product experiences that produce extra precious information to feed to LLMs. The LLM distributors ought to pay extra for higher information.
Person information stays the forex of the realm, however it’s packaged & offered in a really totally different approach. Cookies, the moribund expertise that created the advert world, will likely be changed by data-purchasing contracts.
Someday, we might go to web sites which have fewer advertisements or none in any respect. The income mannequin of the Web can have modified. Publishers’ promote the info on to the search firms.
Ought to we evolve this fashion, there are any variety of questions round person privateness, information controls, regulation, to not point out how product experiences themselves might change.
The times of the advert community could also be numbered & with it, an period of a brand new enterprise mannequin for the Web.
