Reddit's AI Data Deals: What Google and OpenAI Pay

Reddit's own SEC filings disclose one hard number about its AI data deals: in January 2024 it signed data licences with an aggregate contract value of $203.0 million, running two to three years, with at least $66.4 million of it expected as revenue in 2024. The filings never name the buyers or say what each one pays. The figure everyone quotes, about $60 million a year from Google and a similar amount from OpenAI, comes from press reports citing unnamed people, not from Reddit or its licensees. What Reddit does report is the money: its "other revenue" line, which it says is mostly content licensing, reached $140.0 million in 2025.

This guide is for anyone who holds data and wants to know what the most cited AI data deal actually says, and what it teaches: a founder or CFO of a company with a community, a forum, reviews or years of user posts; counsel reading a buyer's term sheet; a reporter or investor trying to separate filed facts from repeated estimates. It separates what Reddit stated under securities law from what was reported, charts the licensing revenue line from the filings, lists the licensees and the lawsuits against companies that took the data without paying, quotes what Reddit says about this business in its own words, compares other communities that licensed, and ends with the lessons any holder can use.

AIData.Broker publishes the deal ledger and the case ledger this guide draws on, and it acts as the agent of US holders who license or sell their data. That makes us a party in this market, so every figure below links to where it was published. This guide is research from public sources, not legal, tax or investment advice.

Contents

1. The short answer: stated versus reported
2. What Reddit's filings actually disclose
3. What the press reported, and why it is not the same
4. Reddit's "other revenue", year by year
5. Who licenses Reddit's data, and on what terms
6. The lawsuits: what happens to those who take it without a licence
7. What Reddit says about its data business
8. Other forums and communities that licensed
9. What any holder can learn from Reddit
10. Questions people ask
11. What this means for you

The short answer: stated versus reported

The Reddit deals are among the most quoted AI data licences anywhere, and most of what is quoted about them was never stated by anyone who signed them. That matters because the two kinds of number behave differently. A figure in an SEC filing is made under legal liability and tied to a defined period. A figure in a news story "according to people familiar" may be right, may be a first-year number, may include advertising or cloud credits, and cannot be checked. Our deal ledger marks every row by that difference: stated by a party or a filing, or reported by press from unnamed sources.

The table below puts the Reddit figures side by side with their basis. Read it before you repeat any of them. The aggregate contract value and the revenue line are Reddit's own; the per-licensee annual amounts are journalism, and one widely repeated figure is an estimate on top of journalism.

Two things follow. First, anyone who says " Google pays Reddit $60 million a year" is repeating a report, and should say so. Second, the stated numbers are enough to learn from. They show the size of the contracts, their length, how Reddit delivers the data, how it books the revenue and how concentrated it is. The rest of this guide works from those.

What Reddit's filings actually disclose

Reddit went public in March 2024, two months after signing its first large data licences, so the deals had to be described to investors in the prospectus. Securities law requires a company to disclose material contracts and risks, but not to name every counterparty or price. Reddit used that room: it gave the total and the shape of the deals, and kept the buyers and the per-buyer prices out.

The core disclosure reads, in Reddit's words: " In January 2024, we entered into certain data licensing arrangements with an aggregate contract value of $203.0 million and terms ranging from two to three years." The same paragraph says Reddit expected " a minimum of $66.4 million of revenue to be recognized during the year ending December 31, 2024 and the remaining thereafter." Those two numbers are the only dollar amounts Reddit has put on its AI data licences in its filings.

How the data is delivered: an API and quarterly transfers

The most useful sentence for a holder is not a price. In the notes to its financial statements, Reddit explains what the buyers actually get: "Under such arrangements, we deliver our content over time through continuous access to our data API as well as quarterly transfers of Reddit data over the term of the arrangement" ( Reddit final prospectus, SEC). In plain words: the buyer does not receive one file. It gets a live connection (an API, a technical doorway that lets software request data on demand) plus a fresh bulk delivery every quarter for as long as the licence runs.

That structure explains how Reddit books the money. Its annual report says "In our content licensing arrangements, we provide customers with the right to access content from our platform over the contractual period," that "the transaction price in content licensing arrangements is generally a fixed fee or usage-based fee," and that revenue is recognized "generally ratably over the license period" ( Reddit Form 10-K for 2025, SEC). Ratably means evenly over time. A licence worth a given amount over three years shows up as a steady slice each quarter, not as one spike. Our licence term record on delivery, refresh and performance takes its lesson from the same filing: specify the format, the schedule and acceptance, and tie refresh fees to new data ( the record).

What the filings say about concentration

Reddit is candid about how few buyers carry the business. At the IPO, its risk factors said: "Although we have negotiated data agreements with a small number of partners that are medium-term in length, to date, substantially all of the contract value associated with our licensing revenue is derived from one of our partners" ( Reddit final prospectus). By its annual report for 2025, after the OpenAI deal, the same sentence had changed: "to date, substantially all of the contract value associated with our licensing revenue is derived from two of our partners" ( Reddit Form 10-K for 2025).

Reddit does not name the partners in either filing. The public announcements that line up with them are Google in February 2024 and OpenAI in May 2024 (both covered below). What a holder should take from this is the shape: even one of the most valuable community datasets on the internet has, so far, two buyers that matter. The filing goes on to warn that "these arrangements may not be renewed, or they may be renewed based on less favorable terms, such as using fewer services at lower pricing." That is the risk of a market with few buyers, written by the seller itself.

The other risks Reddit lists

The same risk factor names the obligations that come with recurring access. "Our content licensing agreements are subject to terms and conditions, including API performance requirements, that we may be unable to meet," it says, and "the value of content for AI training purposes may be reduced over time" ( Reddit Form 10-K for 2025). A holder that sells live access takes on a service obligation (uptime, speed, completeness) that a holder selling a one-off file does not. Price that in, or do not promise it.

The prospectus also disclosed a regulator's interest. Reddit wrote that "on March 14, 2024, we received a letter from the FTC advising us that the FTC's staff is conducting a non-public inquiry focused on our sale, licensing, or sharing of user-generated content with third parties to train AI models," and added "We do not believe that we have engaged in any unfair or deceptive trade practice" ( Reddit final prospectus). We found no public outcome of that inquiry. For a holder, the point is that licensing what users wrote draws regulators' attention even when the user terms allow it, and that the attention arrives before any complaint does. Our guide to whether it is legal to sell customer data covers the US rules that apply.

What the press reported, and why it is not the same

Almost every article about Reddit's AI deals leads with a per-buyer annual figure. Those figures have a lineage worth knowing. When Google and Reddit announced their partnership on 22 February 2024, neither stated a price. The Verge reported the deal as " reportedly worth $60 million per year", relaying earlier reporting from people familiar with it. When OpenAI and Reddit announced theirs in May 2024, again with no price, the figures attached to it came later and second-hand: Sherwood News wrote that " Reddit reportedly struck deals of $60 million per year with Google and OpenAI last year," citing Bloomberg.

A third figure circulates for OpenAI: around $70 million a year. It appears in an aggregator's list of AI licensing deals, not in a filing or an on-record statement. Our ledger notes that the commonly repeated figure in that range "is an estimate" ( the deal record). We keep the aggregator's rows ( Google, OpenAI) so readers can see where the numbers travel, but we never let one carry a claim alone.

How to read a reported figure

A reported annual figure for a data licence can be wrong in several directions at once. It may describe the first year of a deal whose later years differ. It may bundle things that are not data: the Google arrangement also has Reddit using Google's Vertex AI (Google's cloud AI platform), and in the OpenAI arrangement OpenAI "also becomes a Reddit advertising partner" ( the record). Money that flows both ways, or in services, makes a single annual number slippery. And the people who leak a number usually have a reason to.

There is one cross-check, and it is a loose one. The January 2024 licences together carried $203.0 million over two to three years, and at the IPO Reddit said a single partner carried substantially all of the contract value. A licence of about $60 million a year for two or three years would fit inside that total, so the Google report is consistent with the filing; the filing cannot confirm it. Reddit's whole other revenue line for 2024, which also includes Reddit Premium and other products sold to users, was $114.7 million, and both reported deals started partway through that year (Google in February, OpenAI in May). So the reported per-buyer figures cannot be checked against one calendar year, and they should never be added up and presented as Reddit's licensing income.

The renewal question

Reddit's earliest licences were two to three year contracts signed in early 2024, so their first terms end between early 2026 and early 2027. Talks with Google and OpenAI over fresh terms were already reported in 2025: Sherwood's story on them is the source of the recap of both deals quoted above. Our Google record notes renewal under discussion in 2026, with no outcome found ( the record). When a renewal is signed, the next Reddit filing that describes it will be the first primary evidence of whether recurring AI data access holds its price after the first term, and the deal ledger will add it. Until then, treat any reported renewal figure the same way as the originals.

Reddit's "other revenue", year by year

Reddit reports two revenue lines: advertising, and "other revenue." Its annual report defines the second: "Other revenue consists of revenue from content licensing and products sold directly to users" ( the record, with the filing). It adds that revenue from products sold to users, including Reddit Premium and Reddit Gold, "was not material for the periods presented" ( Reddit Form 10-K for 2025). So the line is the closest public measure of what AI and data licensing earns Reddit, without being a pure one.

The chart shows the line by year from the annual report. The jump from 2023 to 2024 is the January 2024 licences arriving; the slower rise to 2025 is those same contracts running ratably, plus whatever was added.

Source: Reddit's annual report states other revenue of $140.0 million in 2025, $114.7 million in 2024 and $15.2 million in 2023.

Three readings come out of the line. First, the 2024 total, $114.7 million, landed well above the $66.4 million minimum Reddit had told investors to expect from the January licences, which is consistent with a second large licence (OpenAI) starting during the year. Second, growth slowed once the big contracts were running: the rise from 2024 to 2025 is a fraction of the rise from 2023 to 2024. Third, licensing stays small beside advertising. In the second quarter of 2026, Reddit reported total revenue of $805 million, with other revenue at $43 million, up 24% on a year earlier while advertising grew 64%.

What the line cannot tell you

The line does not split licensing by buyer, by use (training against display in answers) or by contract. It mixes licensing with small consumer products. And it records revenue as it is earned, not as contracts are signed, so a new multi-year deal shows up slowly. Quarterly figures for the periods between are in Reddit's quarterly filings; our records currently hold the second quarter of 2026 and the three full years shown, which is why the chart is annual. For the market as a whole, our guide to how big the AI training data market is puts Reddit's line beside the revenues of data vendors and publishers.

Who licenses Reddit's data, and on what terms

Two licensees have been announced, and both announcements describe the same product: structured, real-time access to Reddit content through Reddit's Data API, for use both in training models and inside the buyer's products. Reddit also sells API access to smaller customers on published usage-based terms, but no other AI licensee has been named.

Both named deals are listed as training and display. That combination matters. A licence that lets a buyer train on the data and also show it, quote it or link to it inside an answer is wider than a display-only licence, of the kind most news publishers have signed since (see our guide to AI licensing deals with news publishers). Across our whole ledger, 40 of the 111 disclosed deals license content only to be shown in answers, against 56 that include training.

The commercial API terms behind the deals

Reddit's licences sit on top of a policy change it made in 2023. The prospectus explains that it "changed our Data API Terms in 2023 to enforce rate limits," with pricing "based on usage levels comparable to our own costs," free below a threshold and charged per call above it ( Reddit final prospectus). The change was controversial with Reddit's own users at the time because it ended free bulk access for many third-party apps. Commercially, it did something essential: it turned an open door into a metered one, so that large users had to come to the table. Without that step there is nothing to license, because the data can simply be taken.

Where the rights come from

A platform can only license what it has the right to license. Reddit's User Agreement gives it that right from every user who posts. "You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content," it says, "but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content," and the licence is "worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable." The current version spells out the AI use: "this license includes the right to use Your Content to train AI and machine learning models, as further described in our Public Content Policy" ( Reddit User Agreement). The words sublicensable (Reddit may pass the right on) and transferable carry the deal. A company whose terms of service lack them has a much harder rights question, which our rights checklist and the guide on training data provenance work through.

The same agreement closes the other door: users may not "access, search, or collect data from the Services by any means (automated or otherwise) except as permitted in these Terms or in a separate agreement with Reddit," and while Reddit "conditionally grant [s] permission to crawl the Services in accordance with the parameters set forth in our robots.txt file," "scraping the Services without Reddit's prior written consent is prohibited" ( Reddit User Agreement). That clause is the basis of the lawsuits in the next section.

The lawsuits: what happens to those who take it without a licence

Licensing and enforcement are two halves of one business. A buyer pays for a licence only if the alternative, taking the data, is worse. Reddit has said so in its annual report: "some companies have constructed very large commercial language models using Reddit content without entering into a license agreement with us. While we have commenced litigation and will continue to vigorously enforce against such entities, such enforcement activities could take years to resolve, result in substantial expense and divert management's attention and other resources, and we may not ultimately be successful" ( Reddit Form 10-K for 2025).

Two lawsuits follow that sentence. Both lean on contract and access-control claims rather than on copyright alone, and the reason is worth understanding before the details. Reddit's users, not Reddit, own the copyright in their posts; Reddit holds a non-exclusive licence. A copyright claim over user posts is therefore weak for Reddit. A claim that a company broke Reddit's terms, got around its technical blocks or misled it is Reddit's own.

Reddit v. Anthropic

Reddit alleges that Anthropic "used unauthorized automated access to scrape Reddit content to train and commercialize Claude" ( the record). Anthropic moved the case to federal court, arguing that the claims were really copyright claims, which federal law reserves to federal courts. On 30 March 2026 the federal court disagreed and sent the case back. It held that Reddit's contract, trespass, privacy-covenant and misrepresentation claims are not preempted by the Copyright Act because they rest on extra elements, such as rights under the User Agreement ( the record).

The order's reasoning is the part a holder should read. "The Court finds that Anthropic and Reddit are contractually bound by Reddit's User Agreement from Reddit's showing of Anthropic's constructive and actual knowledge," it says ( the order). It recounts Reddit's allegation that "Reddit approached Anthropic to engage in licensing negotiations, but Anthropic refused and continued scraping Reddit's content," and that Anthropic itself publicly said it honours robots.txt directives ( order, via CourtListener). These are allegations, not findings of what Anthropic did; the case is pending in state court, where the judge in September 2026 let three of Reddit's five claims proceed ( the record, reported).

Reddit v. Perplexity and the scrapers

The second suit targets the supply chain. Reddit sued Perplexity, an AI search company, together with three data-scraping firms (SerpApi, Oxylabs and AWMProxy), alleging they "circumvented its data protection measures and scraped Reddit data from billions of search results without permission" ( the record). The theory is that Reddit content was taken indirectly, from Google's search results pages, rather than from Reddit. Perplexity has said it does not train models on the content, and the scraping firms denied wrongdoing, per press reports. On 31 July 2026 a federal judge "largely rejected Perplexity and SerpApi's attempt to dismiss," finding Reddit had plausibly pleaded a conspiracy "to bypass access controls and obtain Reddit's material" ( the record, reported).

Why contract matters more than robots.txt

A separate ruling explains why Reddit built its cases on contract. In the consolidated copyright cases against OpenAI in New York, Judge Sidney Stein dismissed a publisher's claim under the anti-circumvention part of copyright law, holding that "robots.txt directives are requests that do not effectively control access to copyrighted works, so disregarding them is not circumvention" ( the record). A robots.txt file (the text file that tells crawlers what they may visit) is a sign on the door, not a lock. Our crawler census finds that 11.4% of the sites it reads shut at least one AI crawler out entirely, and 7.5% shut out OpenAI's training crawler. A sign is worth posting, but a holder who wants to be paid needs a binding agreement and a technical barrier as well.

Enforcement is part of the price

The lawsuits are not a side story to the licences. They set the buyer's alternative. The clearest public measure of what unlicensed use can cost is the Anthropic book settlement: the court-approved fund pays about $3,000 per work, four times the statutory minimum ( the lever), out of a $1.5 billion settlement ( the record). A buyer weighing a licence against the risk of a suit is pricing that risk. A holder who cannot credibly enforce has less to sell. Enforcement is also costly for the holder: The New York Times reports its own "Generative AI Litigation Costs" as a separate item in its accounts ( NYT Form 10-Q, SEC). For the law behind these cases, see our guides to whether scraping data for AI is legal and fair use and AI training, and the full case ledger, which tracks 83 lawsuits, rulings and settlements.

What Reddit says about its data business

Reddit's filings describe the data business in confident language about the asset and cautious language about the revenue. Both are worth quoting, because they are one of the most detailed accounts any large platform has given of selling user content for AI, and because a holder's buyer will have read them.

On the asset, the annual report for 2025 says "we view Reddit as one of the most important and differentiated data sources," that "Reddit is one of the internet's largest corpuses of authentic and constantly updated human-generated conversations," and that "Reddit is often cited as one of the most sourced and cited domains in AI across all models" ( Reddit Form 10-K for 2025). The prospectus had made the freshness argument directly: "in a world increasingly saturated with AI-generated content, we expect users to increasingly seek out and value fresh ideas, and that models will need to refresh their learning from these ideas" ( Reddit final prospectus). That sentence is the commercial case for recurring access in one line.

On the revenue, the tone changes. "We are in the early stages of our content licensing efforts, and the market for content is new and evolving rapidly. There is no assurance that we will be able to sustain revenues from these efforts," the annual report says, and "The licensing of content for machine learning and AI training purposes is a novel business model without an established track record" ( Reddit Form 10-K for 2025). It also limits what Reddit will sell: it explores licensing "for purposes that do not conflict with our values and the rights of Redditors."

Reddit's view of who buys has widened. The annual report says Reddit continues "to strategically explore content licensing agreements with collaborative partners in the ecosystem, ranging from marketing intelligence and enterprise-scale technology companies to specialized providers in the financial services industry," and that "our content licensing offerings face competition from other sources of information, including news, publishing, entertainment, and social media" ( Reddit Form 10-K for 2025). The buyers of a large text archive are not only AI labs. Our buyer board lists the kinds of buyer that take each kind of data.

The annual report also names the threat on the other side: competition from AI products themselves, "such as those built by Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic; Redditors may choose to find information using AI tools, which in some cases may have been trained using Reddit content, instead of visiting Reddit directly." A holder whose data trains a model that then replaces the holder's own product is selling at a discount whether it knows it or not. That is the strongest argument for keeping licences finite and non-exclusive, and for pricing the life of the trained model separately ( the lever).

Other forums and communities that licensed

Reddit is not the only community whose members' writing has been licensed to AI companies, but it is the only one in our ledger that has put a dollar figure in a filing. Most of the other community and platform deals resemble Reddit's (access to a living collection, non-exclusive), and none discloses a price. The table lists them, together with the clearest public evidence of what the same kind of content sells for when nobody licenses it.

Stack Overflow: the same deal, a shrinking asset

Stack Overflow signed with Google and OpenAI within weeks of Reddit, on the same model: paid API access ("OverflowAPI") to a curated archive of questions and answers. Its public API counts 24,134,193 questions on the site in total. But the flow of new ones has collapsed. The same API counts 986 questions asked in September 2026 and still on the site, against 24,732 in September 2024 and 119,730 in September 2021 on the same query ( the record).

For a holder, that contrast is the whole argument for refresh. A buyer licensing Stack Overflow today is mostly buying an archive; a buyer licensing Reddit is buying an archive plus a live stream that, as Reddit puts it, "constantly grows and regenerates." The first loses value as models absorb it; the second keeps renewing what makes it worth paying for again. If your community still grows, say so in numbers; if it does not, price it as an archive.

Scraped copies set the floor, not the price

The last two rows matter more than they look. A web data company sells scraped Quora and Wikipedia datasets at fractions of a cent per record ( Quora, Wikipedia). That is what community text fetches when anyone can collect it and nobody can grant rights: a commodity price with no licence behind it. Reddit's whole strategy, from metering the API in 2023 to suing scrapers in 2025, was to move its content out of that bucket. The gap between a scraped dataset's price and a licence's price is the value of rights, freshness and the right to sue together.

Platforms that train on their own users' posts

One more group belongs here, although nobody is paid. Several large platforms train their own models on what their users post, and in Europe the data protection regulator has stepped in each time: Meta paused training on EU Facebook and Instagram posts in June 2024 ( record) and resumed in May 2025 after changes ( record); X agreed to suspend Grok training on EU users' posts ( record); LinkedIn was allowed to proceed under monitoring ( record). These are not licences, but they show the cost of user content: a platform that uses posts for AI, its own or a buyer's, should expect a privacy regulator to ask how users were told.

What any holder can learn from Reddit

Most holders are not Reddit. They are a software company with a customer forum, a marketplace with years of reviews, a professional network, a support desk with millions of tickets, or a closed company whose archive sits in a data room. The Reddit filings still carry lessons for all of them, because they are the clearest public description of a working data licence at scale. Each lesson below links to the record or lever it rests on.

1. Sell access to refreshing data, not a one-off file

Reddit's licences deliver "continuous access to our data API as well as quarterly transfers of Reddit data over the term of the arrangement." The buyer pays for a stream, and Reddit books the money evenly over the term. Our lever on recurring access rests on the same filing, alongside Meta's reported multi-year deal with News Corp ( the lever). Compare the companies that sold archives once. Informa says its AI partnerships produced $75m+ of non-recurring data access revenue for Taylor & Francis in 2024; Wiley's AI licence revenue fell to $13.7 million in a quarter, against $28.9 million a year earlier; Getty guided its 2026 revenue down, attributing the decline to one-time recognition of 2025 licensing deals ( the lever). One-off deals can be paid largely up front: Getty recognised about $40 million of $65 million from two multiyear deals in the quarter they were signed ( the lever). That is good cash, but it does not repeat. A holder whose data keeps growing should sell the growth.

2. The refresh is what the buyer pays again for

A licence that includes quarterly deliveries gives the holder a reason to be paid at each one, and a reason for the buyer to renew. Reddit's own prospectus makes the case that models "will need to refresh their learning." Our licence term on delivery and refresh recommends tying refresh fees to new data and specifying format, schedule and acceptance ( the term). Stack Overflow's falling question count shows the flip side: when the refresh dries up, the archive is all that is left to sell.

3. Two to three years, then renegotiate

Reddit chose terms of two to three years. That is long enough to justify a buyer's integration work and short enough to reprice once the market moves. Our record on term length puts it plainly: for a living company, a two to three year term with renewal and refresh rights keeps the holder's leverage, while a one-off archive should be priced as a perpetual sale ( the term). Price the life of the trained model separately: models trained during the term usually survive it, and a buyer will ask for that right by default ( the lever, the term).

4. A fixed fee, with usage on top

Reddit describes its transaction price as "generally a fixed fee or usage-based fee." The holder's version is a fixed minimum that does not depend on the buyer's success, plus a variable part linked to use or to each refresh. The best documented example outside Reddit is OpenAI's deal with Dotdash Meredith, which Adweek reported as a minimum of around $16 million per year plus a variable component ( the term).

5. Stay non-exclusive, unless the price says otherwise

Both Reddit's and Stack Overflow's named deals are non-exclusive: the same content went to Google and to OpenAI. Non-exclusive data can be sold again and again ( the lever). Exclusivity has a price, and founders who sell training environments put it at roughly 4 to 5 times a non-exclusive deal ( the lever). Never give it away by default.

6. Close the open door before you sell

Reddit could license its data only after it metered its API and wrote scraping out of its terms. A holder whose data sits on public pages has to do the same, in three layers: terms that forbid collection without agreement, a technical barrier (rate limits, logins, bot blocking), and a robots.txt that says what you mean. Remember the ruling that robots.txt alone is not an access control ( the record). Our crawler census shows what other sites block.

7. Expect few buyers, and plan for the renewal

Reddit's own words, "substantially all of the contract value" from one partner and then two, describe the market every holder enters. The buyer board lists who takes each kind of data, but for any one dataset the real number of serious bidders is small. That is why a competitive process matters, and why a holder should know before signing what happens at renewal: price reset, rights to models already trained, and deletion of the raw data if the buyer walks away.

8. Get the rights from your users, in writing

Reddit's User Agreement grants it a sublicensable licence and names AI training. Many companies' terms do not. Before a buyer's counsel asks, check whether your terms of service let you license what users wrote, whether private messages or personal data are in scope (they usually should not be), and whether any data came from a third party whose terms forbid AI use. Our rights checklist lists the questions a buyer's counsel asks; 15 of them block a sale until they are answered.

Worked example: a software company with a customer community

Example. A 60-person business software company runs a public community forum where customers have asked and answered product questions for nine years. An AI company that builds coding and support agents has asked whether it can license the forum.

First, the rights. The company's terms of service give it a licence to what users post, but the licence is not sublicensable and does not mention AI. That has to be fixed before any sale: counsel updates the terms going forward and decides whether the archive can be licensed under the old terms or only in part. Private messages and anything carrying customers' personal data are carved out.

Second, the structure. Following Reddit, the company offers access, not a file: an initial delivery of the archive, then a refresh every quarter for two years, non-exclusive, with a fixed annual minimum plus a fee per refresh. Models trained during the term may survive it, priced as a separate line. The company does not promise an uptime level it cannot staff; it promises delivery dates.

Third, enforcement. The forum is currently open to every crawler. Before going to market, the company adds a clause to its terms forbidding automated collection without agreement, rate-limits anonymous access, and updates robots.txt. It keeps logs, so it can show who collected what if a non-licensee keeps scraping.

Fourth, price. Reddit's figures are not a comparable: they describe one of the largest live conversation archives on the internet. The company starts instead from what similar data sells for and what a buyer will want in the contract, using our valuation and the licence terms, and gets at least one written offer before negotiating. The text deals on our rates page have a median of $16M per contract year, but those are large publishers and Reddit; a forum of this size sits far below them, which is exactly why the structure (refresh, term, non-exclusivity) does more for its price than any headline comparison.

Questions people ask

How much does Google pay Reddit for its data?

Neither company has said. The widely quoted figure, about $60 million a year, is a press report from unnamed sources. What Reddit stated is that the licences it signed in January 2024 together carry $203.0 million of contract value over two to three years, without naming the buyers.

Does OpenAI pay Reddit for data?

Yes. OpenAI and Reddit announced a partnership in May 2024 giving OpenAI real-time access to Reddit content through the Data API, and OpenAI also became a Reddit advertising partner ( the record). The price was not disclosed; reports put it at about $60 million a year, and the higher $70 million figure is an estimate.

How much money does Reddit make from AI licensing?

Reddit does not report AI licensing separately. Its "other revenue" line, which it says consists of content licensing and products sold directly to users (the latter not material), was $140.0 million in 2025 and $43 million in the second quarter of 2026. That is the best public proxy.

Why is Reddit suing Anthropic?

Reddit alleges that Anthropic scraped Reddit content without authorization to train and commercialize Claude, in breach of Reddit's User Agreement, after declining to negotiate a licence ( the record). A federal court sent the case back to California state court in March 2026, finding Reddit's contract claims were not copyright claims in disguise ( the record). The allegations have not been decided.

Can Reddit sell my posts to AI companies?

Under its current User Agreement, users keep ownership of what they post but grant Reddit a worldwide, perpetual, sublicensable licence, and the agreement says that licence "includes the right to use Your Content to train AI and machine learning models" ( Reddit User Agreement). Privacy law and regulators can still limit how personal data in posts is used.

When do Reddit's AI deals expire?

Reddit said its January 2024 licences run two to three years, so their first terms end between early 2026 and early 2027. Talks with Google and OpenAI over fresh terms were reported in 2025, and our record notes renewal under discussion in 2026, with no outcome found ( the record).

Did Stack Overflow sign the same kind of deal?

Yes, within weeks of Reddit: with Google in February 2024 and OpenAI in May 2024, both through its paid OverflowAPI, neither with a disclosed price ( Google, OpenAI). Its stream of new questions has since fallen sharply ( the record).

Can a smaller company license its community data like Reddit did?

Yes, if it holds the rights, can keep non-licensees out, and has something a buyer cannot collect elsewhere. The structure scales down (non-exclusive access, quarterly refresh, two to three year term, fixed minimum plus usage); the price does not. Our guide to how much company data is worth covers smaller holders.

What this means for you

Reddit's filings are the best public evidence that a data licence can be a recurring business rather than a one-time windfall, and they are equally clear about its limits: few buyers, service obligations, renewal risk, and enforcement that takes years. If you hold data that people keep adding to, the lessons translate directly.

1. Check your rights first. Read your terms of service the way a buyer's counsel will, with our rights checklist and the guide to training data provenance.
2. Decide what you are selling: an archive (price it once, as a perpetual sale) or access that refreshes (price it per term, with a fee per refresh). Our licence terms set out where a holder should stand on each clause, and the guide what is a data licensing agreement explains the contract.
3. Close the open door before anyone asks: terms, rate limits and robots.txt, informed by our crawler census.
4. Get a range before you get an offer, with our valuation, and read the deal ledger and price board for anchors that genuinely compare. If an offer is already in your inbox, run it through the offer check.
5. Negotiate the structure as hard as the price: term, exclusivity, model survival and deletion. Our negotiation levers show what moved prices in public deals.

If you are a US holder and want an agent to run the sale, AIData.Broker acts for the holder only: the holder licenses or sells its own data to the buyer, and pays us a fee fixed in the mandate only if a sale closes. Whether to go direct or through us is your call. For the wider picture, read how AI companies get training data, the AI training data prices guide, and the selling guide. Every number above is on the records page with its source; how we source every number explains the method.