Reddit’s data-licensing business, the unit investors have treated as the company’s AI call option, generated $43 million last quarter, up 24% year over year, according to The Motley Fool’s August 17, 2026 report. OpenAI and Google remain the two named buyers. Set against Reddit’s $663 million in quarterly revenue — the figure the company reported in the print CNBC covered from the prior quarter — licensing is still a rounding error, not a business line.
That smallness is the whole story, and it cuts two ways. On the upside case, Wells Fargo told TIKR.com the combined Google-OpenAI deals could be renegotiated to $550 million annually, more than quadrupling a run rate TIKR pegs at roughly $130 million — which would make even a $43 million quarterly print look like the early innings of something real. On the downside case, CNBC reported on July 22, 2026, that Reddit and Google have discussed shutting off Google’s AI access entirely, with the existing $60 million-a-year deal ending and renewal talks ongoing, as Google’s AI Overviews cut into the referral traffic that makes Reddit’s content valuable to advertisers in the first place. Wells Fargo, per TIKR, pegs that cannibalization at a $16 billion drag on Reddit’s enterprise value — a number two orders of magnitude larger than the licensing revenue it’s supposedly compensating for.
Reddit’s $43 million licensing line isn’t undersized because the market is young — it’s undersized because the buyers on the other side of the table are the same companies siphoning off the traffic Reddit needs to sell ads.
The CuriosityStream comparison is instructive on how investors are pricing this pattern generally. Finance.biggo.com reported that CuriosityStream’s stock jumped roughly 37.5% on August 13, 2026, after quarterly licensing revenue grew 48% to just $14.1 million — proof that the market will reward AI-licensing growth rates on almost any base, small companies included. Reddit gets no such pop for $43 million because its licensing revenue is legible against a $2.2 billion annual business (SQ Magazine, citing Reddit’s 2025 results) rather than treated as a standalone growth story. That’s arguably the more honest framing: licensing is a side payment from a handful of frontier labs, not a scalable product line, and Reddit’s own daily-active-user growth — 39% year-over-year in Q4 2024, decelerating to 19% by Q4 2025 per SQ Magazine’s tally of Reddit’s disclosures — is the number that actually determines whether Google and OpenAI keep paying for fresh training data at all.
Watch what Reddit’s Q2 2026 print, and the eventual Google renewal terms, do to that $130 million run rate. If the number moves toward Wells Fargo’s $550 million ceiling, the licensing business becomes a real second revenue stream. If Google walks, or renews at a discount tied to reduced referral value, the $43 million figure The Motley Fool flagged on August 17 will look less like an early-stage business and more like the ceiling.
Reddit's Data Licensing Revenue Grew 24% to $43 Million, With OpenAI and Google as Its Two Biggest Buyers. Here's Why That Number Is So Tiny.
