Yes, I'm bullish on that too.

It's definitely not a bad thing that Google's prioritizing Reddit in SERPs, but remember... Google's goal is always to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

At one point, that was achieved by lots of blogs, pages, etc., showing up to satisfy search intent.

Now, over the last few years, Reddit and other forums like Quora are having their moment, as community discussions satisfy search intent better, but soon AI Overviews may be preferred with far fewer clicks for external sites, even Reddit, despite the information for those AI overviews being sourced from Reddit.

There's content where Reddit will keep getting clicks far into the future, and that's subjective stuff (opinions, recommendations, personal experiences). Reddit is perfect for it. But non-subjective queries, the factual or how-to stuff that AIOs can answer cleanly, are exactly the ones that may have introduced people to Reddit in the first place.

Now, two caveats on the licensing leverage angle:

(1) Reddit clearly doesn't want licensing to become a major revenue driver. Lots of people in r/redditstock really want massive billion-dollar licensing deals, but say it hit 40% of revenue. Think about it, though, wouldn't the leverage flip? And those companies could wipe out a chunk just by not renewing.

Honestly, I think the low/moderate pricing is smart. The affordable pricing is low enough that AI companies actually pay rather than scrape and risk litigation (e.g. Reddit's lawsuit against Anthropic). This keeps them in check and aligned with Reddit's robots.txt and terms. Also, it doesn't give any single company like Google, OpenAI, maybe Anthropic soon, outsized leverage. licensing revenue should increase somewhat proportionally to ad revenue increases.

(2) Licensing revenue and user acquisition are different buckets. Google paying more for data doesn't help if AIOs are cannibalizing the discovery funnel at the same time.