I imagine Reddit's response would be, we have to show annoying ads etc to make back the money we spend on infrastructure. Apollo simply uses our work for free, and so can offer an artificially better deal.
Simply put, the Reddit CEO definitely wants to kill 3rd party apps. He just knows that saying it out loud would have an even bigger backlash. With the current approach, he can pretend to care about 3rd party apps, but do everything to make it financially impossible to run one.
Having Reddit need to do audits of clients (where the clients could do things like quietly reduce the number of ads you get if you've tipped $9.99 or more - or not serve ads if your ID is on this special list so that friends don't see the ads or use a developer special trial build) is impractical and would mean that its even more of a call of if the client is in compliance or not.
What's more, ads served by the API to a client that isn't controlled by Reddit are less valuable - Reddit would have less information about how much engagement they had with the ad.
That's the key: Reddit and Twitter and Facebook and the like are not selling ads, they're selling you, the user. The users are the product. They're collecting every bit of data about you, building personal profiles. 3rd party apps would never be that intrusive. Delivering eyeballs on ads is not enough.
It’s totally fair for them to say they need to address the ad issue. But to claim these apps bring no value is pretty ridiculous on his part.
A lot to unpack here.