How much revenue were third party Reddit apps making?
How much revenue were third party Reddit apps making?
Curious how big the gap was with the API costs.
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According to the Apollo dev, they were taking in £500,000 a year ($10 from 50,000 subscriptions). I don't know if anyone else has revealed any figures
Probably an unpopular opinion....but I do get Reddit's perspective that these apps are profiting without sharing back to Reddit who bears the costs and built the community. I wonder what conversations were had to find an equitable point for both sides and what that looked like.
And so do the app devs -- at least Apollo and RiF have said so explicitly.
As I understand it, reddit announced that they would start charging for API in April. Everyone was concerned/interested but also agreed that reddit should get paid.
The issue is that the amount Reddit wants is 10x to 20x what would be 'typical' for API access like this. (I'm NOT an expert/informed on what normal pricing is, that's just what I've read in multiple sources)
The OTHER issue is that while the announcement of changes/charges was made in April, the (very high) pricing was just announced and there are only 30 days before it starts. That is definitely not enough time for developers to find revenue to cover the higher costs, write the code for app updates, test and deploy. 30 days is just not enough time to get it done.
Apollo seems to be taking the lead/brunt of the publicly visible controversy and has proposed that they could make the transition and pay the bill, IF it was half of what Reddit asks (so, 5-10x typical?) and they allow 90 days for apps to update/implement.
That seems like a pretty reasonable approach, I think.
However other factors that indicate that Reddit really just wants to kill all other apps is that outside apps will never be allowed access to nudity/NSFW content, and they are not allowed to run in-app advertising. Obviously a lot of users are interested in NSFW content and not many users prefer to pay for that app, most people tolerate the ads.
YET, Apollo thinks that they could make it work if given 90 days and a slightly more reasonable price. However spez (reddit CEO) has refused to reply or engage on that proposal.
Interesting....they probably have financial models showing how much more they'll make and assume very few folks will actually quit using Reddit. Time will tell, but know I am already enjoying Lemmy more than Reddit at this point.
Another moderately interesting point is that it seems like Apollo (pretty obviously the biggest 3rd party app in terms of API usage) isn't even in the top-ten of user/abusers of the API.
I take this from this paragraph
On May 31st Reddit posted a chart of large excess usage by some unlabeled API clients, and stated: "We reached out to the most impactful large scale applications in order to work out terms for access above our default rate limits via an enterprise tier
To be clear, Apollo was never contacted, and I've been told from someone internally that Apollo is indeed not one of the unlabeled API clients
The only time that Apollo was reached out to by Reddit in any capacity about usage was late last year when we received an email about a 6 minute period where Apollo's server API usage increased by 35% before lowering again. Despite 35% for 6 minutes being a comparatively small blip (the above post references clients that are over by 500000%), we responded within 2 minutes. We offered to jump on a call with Reddit engineers if they needed an answer ASAP, identified the issue within several hours and Reddit thanked us for the fast investigation
From this post https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_will_close_down_on_june_30th_reddits
Here's the chart in question. It's pretty obvious that the top spot is an irresponsible party, but none none of these are the third party user apps that we are discussing -- Apollo wasn't one of them, so logically neither were any of the smaller apps.
https://preview.redd.it/kfejv14ss83b1.png
Here's the post where the chart is linked
https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/api_update_enterprise_level_tier_for_large_scale
Thank you...great background I wasnt aware of.
I expect those top-ten abusers of the free API, exceeding the limits by 40000% and whatnot are all LLMs sucking up text for training.
Reddit has been letting those project hoover up very valuable (given recent valuations of LLM/AI projects) textual discourse (authored by all of us of course) for free. They may feel a bit foolish, and they are realizing their worth, in terms of the value to LLM efforts.
SO, I think the pricing is related to what they believe the various AI projects can afford to pay.
It's still an easy win for them to kill the third-party apps that they wish were gone, given the NSFW and in-app ads issues.
If reddit wanted to, they could create a seperate pricing tier for usage that passes through to individual humans, rather than to language machines. They are different use cases and absolutely have different value propositions in terms of potential revenue generation.
Indeed, me too. The Jerboa app isn't a million miles away from RiF
If the content and comments here grow consistently and stay reasonably sane, I could see Lemmy obsoleting reddit.
One thing I wonder about is how much confusion will occur over sub names. On reddit, there's a r/worldnews. In Lemmy there could be hundreds of worldnews@(instance_name). Which is the best one?
Of course name collision happens all the time at reddit (eg worldpolitics/anime-titties) but I wonder how Lemmy will cope with the slightly more complicated and potentially confusing collision domains
I understand the multiple instances, but 100% agree name collisions across instances will be the biggest source of confusion. Will be curious how Lemmy tech stack and communities in general work to make this easy-ish for users.
