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Comment by justinhj | Hacker News Reader

Forgive me if I'm making a simplistic reading of this, but it seems the CEO has said that whilst apps and bots are making some good money, Reddit is losing money. Assuming Reddit has already taken cost saving measures (with 2000 staff maybe not), then how can they continue as a business losing money? I wonder if a model would work where all monetization of api calls has to be done through Reddit and the API itself, and they do a 30% revenue share with the apps?

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I think they are fixing this by making bots?

I got more followers in the last 5 days than I've had in the last 15 years: https://i.imgur.com/hjeVvtZ.png

Something is up for sure.

Last week I had an attempt of contact via this new chat-thing from a completely empty new account

> then how can they continue as a business losing money?

The same way Spotify, Twitter, Snapchat and other loss-making companies do? Bring in new financing and new advertisers, fire staff.

None of those companies allow third party apps, do they?

Spotify does. But only for Premium accounts. That would have been a good way to solve this problem, in my opinion.

Apps were always willing to pay money for their usage, but not the insane pricing Reddit put in front of them ($12k for 50 million calls)

2.5$ per user per month doesn’t seem insane at all

It does when it is enacted with one months notice.

They can stop losing money by slashing their workforce and stopping working on features nobody wants (e.g. chat, an official mobile app, etc).

The core site functionality has not changed in over a decade, there’s no need to try to be Instagram.

> all monetization of api calls has to be done through Reddit and the API itself

How does this work with IAP and ads? Or do you mean that only Reddit Premium users should have access to third party apps? Because that would be much more expensive than the $2.50/mo that people are riled up about with the new API pricing.

I would say that making money from sites content by putting it somewhere else with your own ads is simply not allowed. What I would allow is you to charge a subscription to use the api which goes to Reddit and you get some cut like 30%.

>how can they continue as a business losing money?

You can't. Imagine you started a website, you're losing money, and 3P devs are serving your data, ripping out your ads, profiting themselves, and then staging entire public campaigns against you ask them to contribute or get lost.

If I had a small website and asked HN for advice in this regard, 100% of replies would be to boot the 3P dev. Nobody would say, "Dude, let him/her keep doing it! You're being greedy and stupid!"

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