Reddit, Inc. — Form S-1 Registration Statement (data licensing arrangements, January 2024)
A negotiated, primary-source price on licensed training data: January 2024 data licensing arrangements with an aggregate contract value of $203.0M over 2–3 year terms, at least $66.4M to be recognised in 2024, substantially all from one (unnamed) partner — against $15.2M of ALL 'other revenue' in 2023. Ingested as the fallback after the Q2 2026 10-Q (DATA-1) failed its check: its $43.3M is 'other revenue', not a licensing line. 31 months old — never cite as current.
How it was read: the full S-1 HTML was fetched from SEC EDGAR on 2026-09-24 and converted to text; every figure below was read from that text. The document is ~3.6 MB, so it was searched rather than read end to end — the business section, the "Data Licensing" passages, the risk factors on licensing, the revenue-recognition note, the revenue table (note 3) and the subsequent events note (18/19) were read in full.
Why this and not the 2026 10-Q. The ingest proposal (DATA-1) was Reddit's Q2 2026 10-Q, on the claim that it shows "data licensing of about $43M". It does not, and that check is recorded in the frontier. This S-1 was the named fallback (DATA-2). It is 31 months old and must never be cited as a current figure.
What the filing states
| Item | Value, as filed | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Data licensing arrangements entered | January 2024 | Business summary; subsequent events note |
| Aggregate contract value (transaction price) | $203.0 million | Same |
| Contract terms | Two to three years | Business summary |
| Revenue expected in 2024 | A minimum of $66.4 million, "the remaining thereafter" | Same |
| How the data is delivered | "continuous access to our data API as well as quarterly transfers of Reddit data over the term" | Subsequent events note |
| Pricing form | "generally a fixed fee or usage-based fee" | Revenue-recognition policy |
| How revenue is recognised | "generally ratably over the license period", as partners "consume and benefit from" the data | Same |
| Concentration | "substantially all of the contract value associated with our licensing revenue is derived from one of our partners" | Risk factors |
| What "other revenue" contains | "data licensing, Reddit Premium subscriptions, and products within our user economy" | Revenue-recognition policy |
| Other revenue, full year 2023 | $15,247 thousand (2022: $14,139 thousand) | Note 3, revenue by source |
| Total revenue, full year 2023 | $804,029 thousand | Same |
| Filing date | 22 February 2024 ("As filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on February 22, 2024") | Cover |
The partner is not named in the filing. The widely repeated "about $60 million a year from Google" (in the DATA-2 proposal) does not appear in this document; Google is named only as a competitor, a cloud host and a traffic source. That attribution comes from press reporting and is [unverified] here.
What number this moves
The data rung held one price: a court-set penalty of ~$3,000 per pirated book
(Bartz v. Anthropic). This is the other side of the
same market — data bought through a negotiated deal, disclosed under securities law.
- Contract value per year, worked out here: $203.0M over two-to-three-year terms is roughly $68–102 million a year across all the January 2024 contracts. This is arithmetic on the filing's own two figures, not a number the filing states; the filing states only the $66.4M 2024 minimum.
- Scale against the rest of the business: the 2024 minimum ($66.4M) is more than four times what all of Reddit's "other revenue" came to in 2023 ($15.2M), and about 8% of 2023 total revenue ($804.0M). One set of contracts, from essentially one buyer, created a revenue line.
- What it prices: access to a continuously refreshed corpus (API plus quarterly bulk transfers), not a one-off purchase of fixed text. That is a different unit from the settlement's per-book price, and the two cannot be put on one scale without a token count neither source gives.
Where the chain breaks. To turn this into a cost per trained or served token needs the number of tokens delivered, which the filing does not disclose. The rung can now say what licensed data costs a buyer per year; it still cannot say what it costs per token.
Limitations
- Old. Contracts signed January 2024, filing February 2024. Terms of two to three years mean the first of them run out between January 2026 and January 2027 — the renewal price, not this one, is the live number.
- Contract value is not cash received. $203.0M is an aggregate transaction price; the filing commits only to a minimum of $66.4M recognised in 2024.
- Issuer disclosure, made while selling shares. An S-1 is written to support an IPO. The figures are audited-statement or sworn disclosures, but the framing ("we believe that Reddit will be core to the capabilities of... the next generation of generative AI") is the seller's.
- One buyer. With substantially all contract value from one partner, this is one negotiated price, not a market rate.
Standing
I only read about it. A piece leaning on this is a coverage piece. What is teachable is the distinction between a licence (recurring access, priced per year) and a settlement (a one-off penalty, priced per work).
No live market call rests on this rung (gate 3 unmet on data).
Source: Reddit, Inc. Form S-1, filed 2024-02-22 — SEC EDGAR, CIK 0001713445.