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Why should the apps have to pay? Why can't reddit provide a paid version that allows you to access the APIs, which the external apps can then use? You already h
by jerf 3y ago
Why should the apps have to pay? Why can't reddit provide a paid version that allows you to access the APIs, which the external apps can then use? You already have to log in to them anyhow so it's not like you'd need an extra API key or anything. $20/year is probably an order of magnitude more then they make on ads served to me.
The weirdest thing about the ad economy to me isn't that it exists, but as I've banged on before, that the companies will cling to it even when people are begging to pay money to get rid of them. These companies make virtually nothing per year in ads and make up for it in scale.
Latest easy stat I can find [1] is $350 million of ad revenue in 2021. Certainly this is less than $2/year from most active users. I'm willing to outbid them by an order of magnitude easily. If even 1% of the user base follows along that's a lot of money.
I don't understand why these companies are so insistent on bending their entire platforms around ad revenue to the exclusion of all else, when "all else" is so much money for someone already scraping pennies from people. Besides, a lot of ad spend was tied to ZIRP; I would think that while the ad business as a whole is certainly in no danger of disappearing, now is a great time for any ad-focused business to be diversifying because spends are very likely to go down in the medium-term, if not the short term. A lot of economic signals are flashing "recession" and ad spend tends to get hit pretty hard in that context. A solid base of subscribers paying real money for your service is a better foundation to go into that sort of economic environment than being solely dependent on ads. (Obviously, a recession will hit your subscriber base too, but that's stickier than ad spend I expect.)
(And an obligatory observation that they are shoving ads in your face, tracking your every move, crafting something you spend hours a week on to increase your advertiser profile value in your every interaction, deploying every addictive psychological trick they can think of to keep you active, and fundamentally polluting at a deep and profound level the entire social sphere of damned near the entire species... for pennies a month. That's all. Pennies a month. They're not even making the money you think they are. They're doing all this to you and the collective social sphere for a few pennies a month.)
[1]: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/reddit-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/reddit-statistics/
- eddieroger 3y agoThat idea came up in the massive thread created by the author of the iOS app Apollo. A compelling reason it wouldn't work is it creates confusion and tension between Reddit, Apollo and the user when things don't work, as well as with regards to who's paying for what. If I have to pay Reddit $10/mo to use it, why do I also have to pay this app developer $1 to use their app? When it fails, is it Reddit who owes me support or Apollo? What about outages? Just a lot of moving parts. Not that I don't think it's worth it, but it does get confusing for average users.
- danudey 3y agoBut are average users the ones who are paying extra to use a third-party client? I think we've seen with Twitter that third-party clients are not the majority of users, but rather a vanishingly small yet more technical and more enthusiastic group of posters. That might be different for Reddit, since Reddit's app is broken and stupid in many ways that the official Twitter app was not (though it, too, was garbage), but I think it's still relevant.
- shmatt 3y agoAre you really clicking on that many ads?
- jerf 3y agoI'm just dividing revenue by number of users, and honestly trying to be a bit generous as a ballpark estimate. Most users are probably even less per year.
- Sebb767 3y ago> I'm willing to outbid them by an order of magnitude easily. If even 1% of the user base follows along that's a lot of money. They already have monetization in the form of Reddit Gold and awards. You can pay for premium right now. Also, people are _really_ reluctant to pay for services they get for free; take a look at the recent thread about YouTube ads [0] and the lengths some people go to in order to justify watching the content for free (while blocking ads, no less). I don't necessarily disagree with your take, but I'm pretty sure you're overestimating how much people are willing to pay Reddit directly. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35892512 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35892512
- yellow_postit 3y agoReddit likely needs ads to justify its VC valuation. That means no apps that can bypass ads or change the display and (likely) more heavily redacted brand unsafe content (esp porn). Hoping they learned from Tumbr and others though. There are some niche subreddits I really enjoy and don’t want to go back to a world of disparate vBulletin sites.
- microtonal 3y agoI think it's too risky for them. The people with the disposable income to pay say $20-50 per year for Reddit are also the most interesting to advertisers. So, if you move to an ad-free subscription model, you'd better be sure that the fees can replace a substantial chunk of the ad revenue. It was much easier for Google to try this with YouTube because they had plenty of revenue outside YouTube.
- babypuncher 3y agoReddit already has an ad-free subscription model. The problem is that their app is awful. Why would a power user pay Reddit to remove ads when Apollo can remove ads and provide a user experience that doesn't make you want to rip off your own fingernails?