I feel like ad revenue is not their top monetization priority personally. It’s speculation of course. But I think they are learning that the free content the users create will generate much more revenue from mega corps who want access to all of it to train emerging AIs. Data, specifically YOUR data is valuable. What posts do you look at? What do you upvote? What do you downvote? What subreddits do you subscribe to? There is a wealth of information they will monetize. This is why I think they don’t care that the little app devs can’t afford their new API pricing. They can’t give the app devs one price then think Microsoft, Google, Apple and other multi-billion dollar corps would pay a higher price.
Again, this is just my speculation. But the suddenness and the exorbitant price means they want to act now, and capitalize on this new market while it’s good. Their terms of service specifically say everything you post, you give them a license to use, sell, or sub-license without dispute, forever. This isn’t about ads.
I was thinking the same thing. Probably why the timeline is so fast too with only giving people a month’s notice of the API costs. And could also be true of twitter.
ChatGPT and other LLMs are gaining a lot of value from information freely available online and sites with large user generated text submissions like Reddit/twitter want a piece of the pie.
The problem with this line of thinking is “why is 3rd party API data any less valuable than 1st party API data for AI training?” While this may be true, I don’t see this particular move being motivated by AI. They still have all the API calls and interactions even if they aren’t being made by Reddit’s own apps.
I may be wrong here, but what I mean is they have ways to stop LLM companies from web scraping all of Reddit. The only other way the likes of chatGPT can get all the info is through to API which is currently free. So I think Reddit might be doing is saying this information isn’t free so pay X amount for access to our data.
Obviously 3rd party apps like Apollo won’t pay that, but Google and OpenAi probably will.
I’m not too sure what you mean by api data being worth less or more, it’s all the same data.
I feel like ad revenue is not their top monetization priority personally. It’s speculation of course. But I think they are learning that the free content the users create will generate much more revenue from mega corps who want access to all of it to train emerging AIs. Data, specifically YOUR data is valuable. What posts do you look at? What do you upvote? What do you downvote? What subreddits do you subscribe to? There is a wealth of information they will monetize. This is why I think they don’t care that the little app devs can’t afford their new API pricing. They can’t give the app devs one price then think Microsoft, Google, Apple and other multi-billion dollar corps would pay a higher price.
Again, this is just my speculation. But the suddenness and the exorbitant price means they want to act now, and capitalize on this new market while it’s good. Their terms of service specifically say everything you post, you give them a license to use, sell, or sub-license without dispute, forever. This isn’t about ads.
I was thinking the same thing. Probably why the timeline is so fast too with only giving people a month’s notice of the API costs. And could also be true of twitter.
ChatGPT and other LLMs are gaining a lot of value from information freely available online and sites with large user generated text submissions like Reddit/twitter want a piece of the pie.
The problem with this line of thinking is “why is 3rd party API data any less valuable than 1st party API data for AI training?” While this may be true, I don’t see this particular move being motivated by AI. They still have all the API calls and interactions even if they aren’t being made by Reddit’s own apps.
I may be wrong here, but what I mean is they have ways to stop LLM companies from web scraping all of Reddit. The only other way the likes of chatGPT can get all the info is through to API which is currently free. So I think Reddit might be doing is saying this information isn’t free so pay X amount for access to our data.
Obviously 3rd party apps like Apollo won’t pay that, but Google and OpenAi probably will.
I’m not too sure what you mean by api data being worth less or more, it’s all the same data.
Almost certainly true. Historically, you’d just grab the dumps from pushshift.
https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/134tjpe/reddit_data_api_update_changes_to_pushshift_access/
This makes sense. I get the argument now. Thanks!