Reddit is about to make a sweeping change, allowing subreddits to require users to pay in order to view their content. The announcement marks a significant departure from Reddit’s historical approach. A major part of the platform’s appeal has been the ability to share information widely and freely, though some users hope that paywalled subreddits could promote more thoughtful digital communities engaged in higher-quality discussions on niche topics.
Founder and CEO Steve Huffman shared the idea during a recent video-based Ask Me Anything (AMA) session hosted on the platform. He revealed that after the company’s last quarterly earnings report showed disappointing results, Reddit is testing different monetization approaches. Huffman expects to offer a “paid subreddit” feature later in 2025.
Venturing into Paid Premium Features
This won’t be the first paid premium feature Reddit has offered. The company previously launched a subscription that has been running continuously since 2010. The service, called Reddit Gold, provides paying users with ad-free scrolling and access to an exclusive subreddit called r/Lounge. However, Reddit Gold has not been a big moneymaker for the platform.
Other attempts at monetization have included more frequent on-site advertising, especially in the platform’s mobile app, which has earned complaints from users who aren’t Reddit Gold members. Reddit’s Contributor Program pays some popular users for contributions across the platform based on the karma they accrue on the site. Reddit has also entered licensing agreements with OpenAI and Google, allowing both companies to use Reddit content to train their AI models.
Last year, Huffman revealed that the company was considering providing a new type of subreddit that would place “exclusive content or private areas” behind a paywall. Now, that idea appears to have evolved into the forthcoming addition of entirely paid subreddits, which Huffman referred to during his AMA as one of the “new, key features” that 2025 will bring to the Reddit platform.
While details are few, so far it seems like current subreddits will continue to be free. The paywalls would be a feature for newly created subreddits. However, the exact timeline for the rollout of the new feature remains unknown. Huffman did tease several other additions during the AMA—including the use of AI to summarize Reddit search results and features that could potentially lay the foundation for later adding a Reddit marketplace—so the one certain thing is that 2025 will be an eventful year for the twenty-year-old platform.
Challenges Faced
As Reddit has not previously paywalled content, the transition will entail thinking through some complicated logistical considerations. Most of Reddit’s content is aggregated, and the company will need to think through how to incentivize more original content on the platform, even as some creators have been removing their content following the licensing agreements with Google and OpenAI. Reddit will also need to consider how to provide moderation for paywalled subreddits, as the current volunteer-based moderation model is unlikely to be successful if volunteer moderators are uncompensated for content that is generating revenue for the platform.
Some have suggested that Reddit could compete with other paid content platforms such as Patreon by allowing individual creators to run paywalled subreddits. This option may prove appealing, as many creators already run private subreddits to take advantage of the platform’s ease of generating more conversation and community engagement than is typically feasible on Patreon’s platform.
It is difficult to do more than speculate for the time being. Reddit CEO Huffman has provided few details about the upcoming feature beyond his certainty that it will be rolled out soon. As he shared during the recent AMA, “We’re working on it as we speak.”
