How has management said they want to renew contracts? New terms ?

Across Reddit’s Q2 2026 (July 30, 2026) and Q3 2026 (October 29, 2026) earnings calls—alongside leaked negotiation updates from July 2026—CEO Steve Huffman and management have taken an increasingly aggressive posture on renewing the Google ($60M/yr) and OpenAI ($70M/yr) contracts.

Because Google’s expansion of AI Overviews and AI Mode has actively cannibalized search referral traffic to Reddit (causing Reddit to warn of a low-double-digit DAUq decline in Q4 2026), management has made it clear they will not simply roll over the original 2024 flat-fee structures.

1. New Contract Terms Management is Pushing For

• Shift from Flat Fees to Usage-Based Pricing: In late July 2026, reports surfaced (via the Wall Street Journal) that Reddit executives are demanding usage-based fees for renewals rather than the flat ~$60M–$70M annual "all-you-can-eat" payments signed in early 2024. As LLMs rely more heavily on live RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) queries rather than one-time pre-training, Reddit wants compensation tied directly to how often Gemini or ChatGPT pings its real-time Firehose API.
• Unbundling the "Layers" of Access ("Not Binary"): Instead of a single blanket license, Huffman explicitly broke down the data relationship into four distinct commercial layers that can be priced or negotiated independently:

1. Base Training (historical corpus)
2. Post-Training / RLHF ("teaching models how to talk")
3. Grounding / RAG (real-time verification)
4. Search Indexing & Display (how Reddit content is summarized or shown in products)

• Ecosystem & User Acquisition Return ("Fair Exchange of Value"): Management stated that cash alone isn't enough if the AI product cannibalizes Reddit's user funnel. Renewals must include mechanisms that bring users into the Reddit ecosystem (and its high-monetizing mobile app), rather than summarizing Reddit threads on Google or ChatGPT so the user never clicks through.
• Weaponizing the "Logged-In Only" Wall as Leverage: During the Q3 2026 call (Oct 29, 2026), management announced they are testing a logged-in-only experience (putting up a login wall for logged-out web visitors). Huffman explicitly noted that transitioning to a logged-in-only wall is designed to "protect our corpus" and make Reddit fundamentally unscrapeable for non-paying or expired partners, forcing AI companies to pay on Reddit's terms to access the live feed.

2. Direct Analyst Q&A from Earnings Calls

Management has been pressed directly by Wall Street analysts on whether they would actually walk away from Google and OpenAI. Below is the exact breakdown of the questions and Huffman's responses:

Q3 2026 Earnings Call (October 29, 2026)

• Analyst Question — Naved Khan (B. Riley Securities): "Maybe on a related note, Steve, maybe just talk about the opportunity for content licensing. You already have existing relationships with OpenAI and with Google for Gemini. And since you're testing logged-in and planning to go down that route, how are you thinking about continuing to license the corpus to these partners?"

• Management Answer — Steve Huffman (CEO): "It doesn't change—anything we mentioned on the call doesn't change our perspective there. We don't have any updates to share, but we're in active discussions. What's most important is that any deal we do needs to advance our long-term strategy and has to be a fair exchange of value. And that includes not doing a deal."

• Key Takeaway: Management explicitly put "not doing a deal" on the table on the Q3 call, signaling to Google and OpenAI that because Advertising makes up 95% of Reddit's revenue ($847M Ad revenue vs. $48M Other/Licensing revenue in Q3 2026), Reddit is willing to sacrifice high-margin licensing revenue if the AI summaries damage its core user funnel.

• Analyst Question — Jason Helfstein (Oppenheimer): Asked how investors should model the business under the "logged-in-only" test and whether Reddit will become completely unscrapeable.

• Management Answer — Steve Huffman (CEO): Explained that logged-in and app users already drive over 80% of Reddit's monetization. He confirmed that requiring logins will make unauthorized scraping significantly harder and protect the underlying data corpus while they negotiate commercial terms, adding: "At this point, we're the only major platform that doesn't do this."

Q2 2026 Earnings Call (July 30, 2026)

• Analyst Question — Rich Greenfield (LightShed Partners): "Do you see any world where you're not licensing data to Google and OpenAI next year? ... And are there more buyers of that data than just Google and OpenAI in your mind?"

• Management Answer — Steve Huffman (CEO):

• On walking away & unbundling: "Is there a world in which we don't do licensing? Well, I think the range of outcomes is wide, and we have to look at every aspect of this and make sure that we're maximizing value to Reddit. Within Google, it's not just licensing... Reddit is used for training, it's used for post-training to teach models how to talk, it's used for grounding, it's used as a search index. These deals aren't binary... For us, it's not just traffic or clicks. We want users into the Reddit ecosystem and that flywheel of Reddit. That's what we're looking to do in any of these relationships."

• On additional buyers beyond Google/OpenAI: "Of course."

3. The Core Tension in the Renewal Negotiations

The numbers in the Q3 2026 10-Q highlight why management is playing hardball:

1. Google Cloud vs. Google Licensing Asymmetry: In the Q3 2026 10-Q, Reddit disclosed it extended its cloud spending commitments through 2029—committing $580 million to Google Cloud (Sept 2026 – Aug 2029) and $880 million to AWS (July 2026 – June 2029). Ironically, Reddit is now paying Google roughly ~$193M/year for cloud compute while Google only pays Reddit ~$60M/year for AI data licensing.
2. Search Referral Bleed: On the Q3 call, Huffman stated bluntly that Google search has "shifted in their relationship with the rest of the Internet" as AI Overviews and AI Mode push organic links down the page, cutting roughly 1 million weekly referrals. When Raymond James analyst Josh Beck asked if Google traffic would ever bounce back, Huffman replied: "We don't control Google. We only control Reddit. We are not operating under the assumption that Google traffic comes back."

Because management no longer relies on Google Search holding up its end of the implicit traffic bargain, Reddit is demanding much higher, usage-based direct cash compensation—or threatening to lock its 27-billion-post corpus behind a login wall and cut off real-time API grounding altogether.