Reddit isn’t profitable, despite having more than 50 million daily active users. In preparation for an IPO, CEO Steve Huffman put the platform’s API
Reddit isn’t profitable, despite having more than 50 million daily active users. In preparation for an IPO, CEO Steve Huffman put the platform’s API
Reddit has never had a singular identity. It has had continually changing identities over its entire existence with some clear moments that defined the next chapter. When I first joined it was primarily programmers and other technical people, then the Digg migration happened, then Imgur was created, then it became mainstream and now they are insistent on attempting to make it profitable at the cost of their only value, their users.
At some point it became too big for an identity anyway, there are just too many communities with different cultures and rules for that to be the case.
I totally agree. Devaluing the product seems to be the way of business during this inflation. On social networks it’s the content creators. In the music industry it’s the plummeting percentage paid to artists over the last 5 years. You see it everywhere. Simultaneously requiring subscriptions. Essentially Reddit was going to force the API into a subscription profit model if Christian Selig went along and kept Apollo alive.
I don’t think the plan was ever to get revenue by charging for API calls, it was to make the pricing so high that users would be forced to move to the official app where they could track and serve ads to users. Apparently Reddit management is so stupid that they thought this was the best plan and continued gaslighting their users about it. At the very least they could have been honest about it and said it was to try to improve profitability since they can’t serve ads to 3rd party clients. It still would have made people angry but it would have blown over.
The problem was that when interest rates were low it was easy to get funding from investors for your business without much care for getting a return on it. Gaining users and revenue was more important than profit. Now investors are calling it in since their costs have increased and companies are scrambling to do anything to prove that their business isn’t just a house of cards being held up by a foundation of venture capital money.
It sucks as a customer/user of any of these services since they could have built a sustainable business from the outset, maybe with slower growth, but instead everyone pays the price at the end of the day when the product turns to shit.