Reddit will start charging for entry to its API
Following on the heels of Twitter’s choice to restrict third-party entry to its information, Reddit immediately announced that it’ll start charging to be used of its API.
It’s not a blanket coverage change. As reported by The New York Occasions, Reddit’s API will stay free to builders who wish to construct apps and bots that assist folks use Reddit, in addition to to researchers who want to examine Reddit for strictly tutorial or noncommercial functions.
However corporations that “crawl” Reddit for information and “don’t return any of that worth” to customers should pay up,” Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman informed The Occasions.
“It’s a great time for us to tighten issues up,” Huffman stated. “We predict that’s honest.”
The transfer comes as Reddit appears to be like for methods to monetize its huge array of user-generated content material, which as The Occasions notes has been more and more used to coach high-profile, text-generating machine studying fashions corresponding to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4. As of 2019, Reddit had over 430 million month-to-month lively customers throughout greater than 1.2 million particular curiosity communities, 138,000 are active.
Huffman informed The Occasions that he believes Reddit information is especially priceless as a result of it’s constantly up to date.
“The Reddit corpus of information is absolutely priceless,” he reiterated. “Greater than some other place on the web, Reddit is a house for genuine dialog. There’s loads of stuff on the positioning that you simply’d solely ever say in remedy, or AA, or by no means in any respect … However we don’t want to provide all of that worth to a number of the largest corporations on the planet totally free.”
Shareholders could possibly be the motivator. Reddit hasn’t introduced the small print of its API pricing but. However the firm is getting ready for a possible preliminary public providing someday later this yr, and buyers will likely be on the lookout for development in — or completely new streams of — income.
Reddit, which was valued at round $10 billion in August 2021, is estimated to have made $350 million from advertisements two years in the past. That whole pales compared to Meta’s and even Twitter’s advert revenues. Meta made $113 billion in 2022, whereas Twitter, regardless of its many controversies, raked in almost $7 billion.
In information associated to the API coverage change, Reddit immediately stated that it hopes to include extra AI into how the positioning operates, corresponding to figuring out using AI-generated textual content on Reddit and including a label that notifies customers {that a} remark may’ve come from a bot. Reddit additionally goals to enhance its moderation instruments and the third-party bots that assist moderators monitor the boards.