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Reddit, an 18-year-old social media and news aggregator, is demanding developers pay thousands of dollars for direct access to its data and content, a more diversified revenue stream. can help in obtaining
According to a post by the creator of a popular third-party app called Apollo, the company first revealed plans for an IPO in late 2021, asking developers to pay $12,000 for every 50 million requests. It is said that there is The developer said the numbers were “extremely” disappointing.
“Apollo made 7 billion requests last month, which equates to about $1.7 million per month, or about $20 million per year,” the developer said in a Reddit post about the change.
Reddit is majority-owned by Advance Publications, the parent company of Condé Nast and major shareholders of Charter Communications and Warner Bros. Discovery.
Application programming interfaces have long been used by third parties to access the data of large Internet companies and connect to their apps. Reddit has a vibrant ecosystem of apps, plugins and services created by amateur and professional developers.
Since Elon Musk took ownership of Twitter and new artificial intelligence-powered tools have been put into products used by millions of people, API costs have become even more of a hot topic. The latest AI programs use large-scale language models and train themselves on a large amount of his web-based content, including user-generated posts on sites like Twitter and Reddit.
Users and developers were outraged when Twitter announced it would charge $42,000 for 50 million requests. Apollo developers said the company’s price is “still $12,000,” despite Reddit’s promises to avoid such extreme pricing.
Apollo said it paid about $166 for the same number of API requests from online image sharing service Imgur.
While many companies charge for using their APIs, Reddit has historically made most of its revenue from advertising. However, compared to peers such as Facebook, Snap, and Pinterest, Reddit struggles to monetize its active user base.
With the digital advertising market facing a slowdown, Reddit may be under pressure to grow its revenue 18 months after notifying it of its confidential IPO filing.
Reddit seems to be hard at work on API pricing. Apollo developers said the company had no issues with the post.
Reddit did not respond to a request for comment.
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