Paid subreddits reportedly on hold as Reddit focuses on search

Good news for redditors: plans for paid subreddits are paused for now.

During Reddit's Q2 earnings call, CEO Steve Huffman said the company is "deprioritizing" initiatives to monetize the user economy on the platform, according to Engadget. In a follow-up AMA, Huffman confirmed that this includes paid subreddits. "To stay focused on what matters most, we’re shifting resources away from a few areas, such as work on the user economy," Huffman wrote. "This includes what some have referred to as paid subreddits."

Previously, Huffman had shared plans for subreddits with "exclusive content or private areas" behind a paywall as a revenue-boosting scheme.

But now, Huffman said the social media forum will focus on "strengthening our core product," which includes "making Reddit the go-to place for search." Growing its user base is critical to driving ad revenue, which brought in $465 million last quarter and accounts for the vast majority of its total revenue, according to its earnings report. That's an 84 percent increase from last year.

If you've googled something recently, you've probably noticed Reddit posts showing up a lot more in search results. Reports from last year showed a massive increase in Reddit's search traffic from Google, likely due to a Google algorithm update that began prioritizing posts from discussion forums. So it looks like that trend has continued.

Huffman also said during the earnings call that the company will be focusing more on using its AI-generated Reddit Answers tool to make Reddit its own search engine. To complicate things, Google confirmed to Mashable earlier this year that Reddit Answers uses Google's Gemini model, as part of a partnership that also allows Google to train its AI on Reddit content.