It seems obvious that Reddit could have altered the rules for 3rd party apps and made them include adverts in exchange for continued free API access, or am I missing a reason why this wouldn’t work?
They could have required Reddit Premium to use third party apps or something of the sort. Or injected ads into third party apps via the API. Or forced third party apps through a verification process to get an API key not unlike Google's Oauth process and monetize it differently for training use cases, etc.
They could have changed their API or keys to require an adserve API included and given the app makers time to adapt to the new setup.
Premium users would only see the ads from Reddit, where non-premium would also have seen ads from the app maker.
It would have increased the ads shown to users, added more money into reddit's pocket, and increased the liklihood of users paying cash for the platform while pissing off fewer people.
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.
Why not though? Seems really straightforward to serve ads over the API and enforce any display guidelines on third-party apps, since there are only a handful of significant apps anyway.
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'.
They didn't even need to do that. They could simply have changed the terms so that user-facing clients like apollo either need to show reddit ads, allowing no ads for users of reddit premium. They approve api users anyways, supposedly, so mod tools and the like could be exempt, and they could introduce higher cost efficient bulk export of comments for large scale generative AI machine learning use cases.
Instead of being the shit-show it is now, it could have been a good money maker.
Can’t Reddit just have a tiered API: one pricing for ad-free API and another for ad-supported? Surely a system could be put in place to ensure compliance.
I have to think there was a path here for Reddit to get its ad money without alienating so many users and mods.
With all the Reddit users effectively quitting because of the 3rd party app stupidity, why didn't Reddit make ad delivery part of the terms of API usage or some other solution?
It's not like their costs go up because you access via the API vs the website/the official app.
Reddit had an easy way out for the issue of 3rd party apps not showing ads, they already have a paid subscription which removes the ads on the official clients, so they could have made the API exclusive to users with a subscription. People would have been upset, but not this upset.
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.
It's certainly not that, other apps that use only public APIs that don't show ads (e.g. Apollo) are specifically acknowledged and allowed by Reddit admins.
reddit already had a policy to show ads only on whitelisted subreddits, so it would have taken something stronger than just "I don't want my ad shown next to X".
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 honestly believe that Reddit has ad targeting figured out in the form of subreddits.
Second, Reddit had/has an opportunity to hear to actually dictate the ad placement rules themselves. They don’t need to promise a certain number of placement, but rather a certain number of clicks.
Finally, they could have made the ad API something that’s locked behind a human review until the app got popular enough. I agree that it’s simply not worth it to fully automate this. Realistically there’s less than 15 clients that would need to implement this.
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.
It's just pure corporate BS, Reddit never even tried to make ads available from the API in the first place. If that was such a problem, they would at least have tried something.
Then ads are half abandoned even on their official platform itself, they polished the avatar NFTs instead... Reddit has probably the most outdated ad market of all the social networks and they cannot blame third party apps for that.
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