Reddit should make an API feature to allow the 3rd party app, the ability to display the ads. Then, Reddit will do profit sharing of each ad shown. This would give the 3rd party app incentive to maintain the app.
There are multiple solutions. This is one of them. Another one would be a bring your own api key and as a user be able to pay. Another one would be to serve ads in the feed for 3rd party api access and make it mandatory thay ads are not filtered out. Yet another one is to work w/ the 3rd party apps to display the ads.
Reddit is just a dumb corpo that doesn't understand why they have success. Watch them backpedal hard.
Or just force API users to publish ads the same way they publish normal threads.
I've used the old.reddit site and ads don't really bother me. On the other hand I've often found the solution to a problem on Google pointing to a Reddit post.
If Reddit just cared about having the ads, they could have a free version of the API that includes the inline ads. Or otherwise work with API users to blend in the ads for user-facing clients. They could even kick back a share of that revenue to client makers.
As far as I know they're not doing any of that. To me it looks like the goal is to wall off all the user-generated content in an attempt to extract maximum dollars from it while intentionally excluding third parties.
Something I've been wondering—why couldn't the API just send a batch of ads to be served with the content? Since the apps need an authorized API key, if they don't cooperate in showing the ads then Reddit could simply threaten revocation.
Then users who want "premium" could pay for whatever feature Reddit-side to allow an ad-free experience, or they could even partner with the third party apps to offer it for a cut of the fee.
(This is assuming Reddit is negotiating in good faith, though that seems to be in question.)
I don’t understand, if API apps not displaying ads is the problem, why Reddit doesn’t include ads in the feed and make displaying them part of the terms for access. They could even have a revenue sharing agreement with the app developers.
API clients would be able to identify ads in the feed and just not show them. "High-profile" apps will be required to show them at risk of Reddit terminating their access, but the long tail will just ignore them.
Reddit and advertisers won't get the same "audience measurement" analytics data, and third parties I imagine would be pretty reluctant to dump some privacy-invading third party sdk blob in their app, especially when they don't really benefit from it.
Also, one of the attractions of third party clients is lack of ads. This'll turn users away from them.
Or just charge a reasonable price for API access that offsets the lost ad revenue. I think Reddit's ad revenue is something like $0.12/mo for an average user. If their API pricing averaged out to $0.15/month/user they would still be coming out ahead.
This would still hurt free third party apps, but I'm sure power users wouldn't mind paying $1/month to keep their favorite third party app going.
Instead, Reddit went for insane API pricing that app developers can't realistically afford at the subscription rates people are willing to pay.
I don't think they should - I'd be happy if they served ads over the API. I use a third party app because I prefer the interface, not purely because it's ad free although that is obviously a nice benefit.
I wouldn't personally pay for Reddit Premium so if ads are the only way to keep third party apps viable then so be it.
That's an interesting way to frame the reddit debacle. Reddit could have mandated ads to be displayed as a part of their TOS of API usage, but just decided not to - for the clear reason of centralizing users to their app. It wasn't /just/ about the loss of revenue - it was also about the metrics they can collect on their platform which they could not do on others'.
That would require the API to also include ad information. I think putting a sensible price on API access would make this a bit simpler, though (and allow for a paid ad-free experience as well). The core issue isn't so much paid API access as the price being so crazy high it can't possibly reflect how much reddit would normally be making from the users of these apps, so instead looks like it is aimed at just shutting down 3rd party apps entirely.
Too hard to display their ads if people access their content via API. I am not going to be surprised at all if reddit soon announces features leaving the API or completely getting rid of it.
third party devs have asked Reddit multiple times for an ad endpoint in the API.
The really good move here would’ve been profit sharing on ads between Reddit and third party apps. But heck these devs were fine displaying ads for Reddit for nothing in return.
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