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Comment by noahtallen | Hacker News Reader

But it would be very simple for Reddit to require ads to be served in Apollo. They could say that in order to view a feed of posts at scale, you'll have to include ads that are injected into the feed. They could revoke the API token for any clients which don't do that. In fact, there are plenty of ways for Reddit to get their money back.

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.

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Certainly seems that way. They had been giving access. Then made pricing outrageous and 30 days to comply. A way to kill them off without straight up removing their access or shutting down the API to third parties in full.

Why not simply charge for the API, and let Apollo figure out a funding model that works for them. It could be subscription, it could be going with a different ad server.

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.

> 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.

Curious how would that be implemented. How do you ensure that third party app actually shows the ads?

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