If the CEO backs down then he’s weak.
He needs to publish a hard hitting memo that chastises third party app developers for not creating more sustainable businesses. If Reddit cannot meet it’s revenue goals it will shut down, period.
He needs to publish a hard hitting memo that chastises third party app developers for not creating more sustainable businesses. If Reddit cannot meet it’s revenue goals it will shut down, period.
2) Building and maintaining an API is as rent seeking as building any kind of subscription service, I don’t see the issue.
3) Why would you pay a volunteer? They’re volunteering. In exchange they wield incredible power over the community, which is the real reason they volunteer.
4) The UX sucks, but there’s still old.reddit.com, so you have options.
5) What additional value can be provided? It’s a giant forum and people post comments, there’s not much more you need, that is the value.
Third party apps can just raise their fees and users will pay a couple more dollars. But it’s not about money, it’s about power. Reddit users are very entitled and care more about optics. They don’t want to surrender a fist full of dollars for a website they use everyday and probably are addicted to.
Yes, but all other social networks are GOOD at it and make a fuck ton of money. That’s the issue. Reddit has had plenty of chances to turn profitable, but they can’t seem to figure it out. Now they’ve run down the checklist and apparently “kill 3rd party apps” is their newest brilliant idea to make money.
Twitter is not even in the top ten most popular social media networks.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...
Providing a per app, per user API key would be the most sustainable way of doing business with 3rd party app developers while keeping users that are willing to pay happy. Plenty of the users that use 3rd party apps already pay something to use them, so it's not out of the question that they would be willing to pay even more to keep using them. I know I would.
Those are the primary user interfaces for their platform, and they're bad. Enthusiast users in particular seem to overwhelmingly prefer third party apps and old reddit, and those third party apps seem to be made by small teams or even solo devs.
https://www.crunchbase.com/search/acquisitions/field/organiz...
No one is throwing away the kind of audience reddit has.
Now the CEO might lose his job, but let's not get that twisted up with Reddit's survival.
The argument was that you can buy an obscene amount of storage and bandwidth for only a fraction of the money they were raising. It is even more true today. Look at the amount of storage and bandwidth archive.org uses and how little money they bring in. This is not a money issue in terms of running the site.
Their expenses are still absurd given that, from my perspective they've literally done no improvement to the product in the last 5 years or more. Just maintain the API, have some staff to run the servers, pay a few admins to support the mods and feature freeze Reddit the site as much as possible.
It's way crazier that Reddit has 2k employees than that Twitter had 4k or whatever.
Edited from $2/month/user to $2/year/user.
But then the leadership would only be wealthy and not famous.
It feels like the focus on ad sales by so many platforms is due to their executives' personal preference in having broad ranging social influence (by playing gateway to the masses) instead of a predictable revenue stream.
The belief that they could further wield influence may drive them to be less concerned about near term profitability.
Merely by recording an actual profit, you have shown your hand to the investor, who can now estimate what your ceiling is. And it's never going to be as much as what it was when profits were merely hypothetical.
Now that the money printer is out of paper, investors are banging on the door, and the people on the other side of that door are panicking. It turns out a bunch of nerds and aficionados piping text through your servers does not equate to a hundred-billion-dollar business, and trying to force the issue will only make things worse.