Home Reddit shares climb on confirmation of sports partnerships

Reddit shares climb on confirmation of sports partnerships

TL:DR

  • Reddit partners with NFL, NBA, MLB, PGA Tour, and NASCAR for exclusive sports content.
  • This collaboration aims to increase advertising revenue by leveraging passionate sports communities.
  • Reddit also signed AI deals with OpenAI and Google to enhance engagement and train AI models.

Reddit has confirmed an agreement with several sports entities, sending its share price upward by around 4%.

A “partnership program” with major league bodies, including the NFL, NBA, MLB, PGA Tour, and NASCAR, will deliver new, exclusive content on its leading platform as a catalyst to increase advertising revenue for the company.

Reddit believes the link-up can take advantage of the crossover between its engaged user base and the passion of sports fans and their insatiable appetite for coverage, with the mega-site already hosting communities devoted to their favorite teams and sports stars.

The collaboration is set to deliver additional coverage such as video highlights, behind-the-scenes access, and other fresh content across the seasons and main events, in the respective sports. The envisaged win-win situation will deliver more consumption for fans while allowing advertisers to utilize Reddit’s vast audience to showcase their brands.

The San Francisco-based website combines elements of social media, messageboards, and news aggregation, founded in June 2005 by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian. It received 20.4 billion page views in the sports category over the last 12 months, an increase of 26% on the previous annual period. 

Reddit entices AI development to drive revenue

Jen Wong, the company COO stated, “The country’s major sports leagues see the opportunity to reach global audiences on Reddit”. She also revealed further exploration is underway to develop further engagement between organizations and the engaged communities on the site.

Since it went public in March this year, the company has been seeking partnership agreements to boost its revenue streams. One earlier deal was an agreement with OpenAI to enable access to Reddit’s Data API “which provides real-time, structured, and unique content from Reddit,” to transmit discussions from the site to ChatGPT.

In return, the social media site will be able to roll out selected AI features to users and moderators, powered by OpenAI, which will now be an advertising partner on the platform.

Reddit also signed $60m terms with Google in a similar partnership, allowing AI models to be trained on its extensive content base.

Image credit: Via Ideogram

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The ReadWrite Editorial policy involves closely monitoring the tech industry for major developments, new product launches, AI breakthroughs, video game releases and other newsworthy events. Editors assign relevant stories to staff writers or freelance contributors with expertise in each particular topic area. Before publication, articles go through a rigorous round of editing for accuracy, clarity, and to ensure adherence to ReadWrite's style guidelines.

Graeme Hanna
Tech Journalist

Graeme Hanna is a full-time, freelance writer with significant experience in online news as well as content writing. Since January 2021, he has contributed as a football and news writer for several mainstream UK titles including The Glasgow Times, Rangers Review, Manchester Evening News, MyLondon, Give Me Sport, and the Belfast News Letter. Graeme has worked across several briefs including news and feature writing in addition to other significant work experience in professional services. Now a contributing news writer at ReadWrite.com, he is involved with pitching relevant content for publication as well as writing engaging tech news stories.

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