Being the last source on the web where relevant information can be found and relied upon on any topic: you find it just by Googling with the term “reddit” or “site:reddit.com” in your question or the topic you search. This user interface, bizarre and brittle as it conspicuously is, stands in castigation of what Google has actually become and in praise of what Reddit still is: easily-indexed and searchable human content which is mostly free from advertisements, sponsorship, Amazon referrer listicles, SEO-optimized blather and other things. For the owners of Reddit, though, those are the hard to slide drawbacks about it. The company is to be sold, and that means amending it into the form taken by the rest of the modern web and app ecosystem.
Application programming interfaces have long been the way third parties access data from large internet companies and connect to their apps. Reddit has a thriving ecosystem of apps, plugins and services created by amateur and professional developers.
The 18-year-old social media and news aggregation site, Reddit, is in need of developers to pay thousands of dollars to directly access the company’s data and content, a move that could help pull in a more extensive source of revenue.
In late 2021, the company first disclosed plans for an IPO, is now asking developers to pay $12,000 per every 50 million requests, as per a post from the creator of a popular third-party app called Apollo. The developer said the number was highly disappointing.
“Apollo made 7 billion requests last month, which would put it at about 1.7 million dollars per month, or 20 million US dollars per year,” the developer said in a Reddit post about the change.
The developer also added that “making the app only available to subscribers” in order to reduce the number of requests would not be a solution, either, as the “average Apollo user uses 344 requests per day, which would mean the average user would cost $2.50 per month. That figure is over double what the subscription currently costs”, Selig said.
Reddit is majorly owned by Advance Publications, the parent company of Conde Nast and a major shareholder in Charter Communicationsand Warner Bros. Discovery.
Application programming interfaces have long been the way third parties access data from large internet companies and connect to their apps. Reddit has a thriving ecosystem of apps, plugins and services created by amateur and professional developers.
API costs have gained wider attention since Elon Musk acquired ownership of Twitter and since new artificial intelligence-powered tools made their way into products used by a huge number of people. Modern AI programs use large language models, which train themselves on mountains of web-based content, comprising of user-generated posts on sites such as Twitter and Reddit.
Users and developers were furious when Twitter declared it would charge $42,000 for 50 million requests. Apollo’s developer said in spite of Reddit’s promise to avoid that kind of extreme pricing, the company price is “still $12,000.”
Apollo said it paid approximately $166 for the same number of API requests from the online image-sharing service Imgur.
While many companies charge for API use, Reddit has historically derived the majority of its income from advertising. But relative to its peers such as Facebook, Snap and Pinterest, Reddit has struggled to make money from its active user base.
With the digital ad market facing a plummet and with Reddit now 18 months removed from the notification of its private IPO filing, the company may be facing backlash to expand its revenue.
Reddit looks committed to the API pricing. The Apollo developer said the company had no problem with the post.
Reddit didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.