Making some amount of profit on it isn't enough. They want to lock down the user experience. Same reason Google started Google Talk with Jabber, then closed of

Making some amount of profit on it isn't enough. They want to lock down the user experience. Same reason Google started Google Talk with Jabber, then closed off their ecosystem. Same reason Facebook embraced third party apps, then shut them all down. Same reason Twitter is locking down their API currently. At a certain size companies want to decide the user experience without outside interference, and they don't want to share. If you read reddit on BaconReader or a similar app, when you pull up the app you will see 10 posts from subreddits you subscribed to. If you pull up the reddit app, you will see 2 posts, 2 ads, and 2 suggested posts you don't care about. Even if reddit charges for the API, the existence of these alternate clients that work way better makes reddit look greedy and bad, like they don't care about their users' experience. So they wanted to kill those alternative methods of using the site. In the process, they look extremely greedy and bad, and like they really don't care about their users' experience. Yet Facebook went through the same process, and they mostly kept their users. And shutting off the 3rd party systems meant they got to decide the entire user experience without having to compromise with anyone. They might end up backtracking because of the boycott, and charge a reasonable amount for the API to make a profit. That would allow the 3rd party apps to keep running while not losing money on them. But that is the compromise. The goal was to kill the apps.