Apollo Shutdown Explained | Reddit API Pricing Triggers Blackout
Reddit API Drama Explained. Goodbye Christian Selig
Reddit used to provide free access to its Api. An Api is a way to access a websites information. Many third party developers used it to make many third party apps with improved user experiences. Users who hated reddit’s interface would use alternative third party apps to browse reddit content.
That all came to an end last month. When reddit announced it would start charging apps to access its Api.
This is a very reasonable thing to do.
Reddit isn’t making any money from third party apps which don’t show reddit’s advertising, the main way reddit makes money.
So users choosing to use third party apps to access reddit instead of the main platform stops Reddit from serving ads and making money.
What’s more, Ai companies like Chatgpt's parent company, open ai and other generative Ai companies are scraping data from reddit comments without paying reddit.
Ai companies are benefiting greatly from reddit’s free buffet of conversational data while reddit has had trouble making money.
Reddit chose to fix this by starting to charge for its api.
Unfortunately reddit’s api pricing was too expensive.
Especially for third party apps using reddit’s api like Bacon reader, narwhal, the reddit is fun app and Apollo.
Today we will focusing on what happened to one of reddit’s most popular third party apps, Apollo and its closure next month.
Apollo is an iOS app that became an editor’s choice app in 2021. The app is beloved by its 1.5 million monthly active users.
Christian Selig, Apollo’s developer was shocked to find out reddit’s pricing. Like his peers, his company couldn’t afford it.
In fact, the ex apple employee and donator of 100% of Apollo’s proceeds to an animal shelter 3 years ago, said he would have to pay 20 million dollars per year to keep using reddit’s API.
Christian Selig’s Goodbye Message On Reddit
/ apollo_will_close_down_on_june_30th_reddits
Transcript of the Christian Selig’s call With Reddit CEO Steve Huffman: https://gist.github.com/christianseli...
Audio of this part of the call:
http://christianselig.com/apollo-end/...
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