Technology
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Is there a reasonable model for commercial sites to survive if their APIs are free?
Ads, like Reddit does and reddit makes a ton of money. If they weren't trying to make nft integrations or new TikTok and just had the staff it took to keep the lights on, it would be a stable successful business.
But the greedy execs want more money so they act like they have no choice but to squeeze the users for everything they can. This is their choice, not a necessity.
Exactly this. They keep repeating that they aren't profitable. But the key question is: why do they need 2,000 employees? IIRC, before they were acquired by Facebook, Whatsapp managed to handle a billion+ users with 50 people.
If I write a third party app, then I can filter out any ads you pass me, or I can make it easy for a user to do at arm's length from me by allowing plugins. This is exactly what's happening with reddit third party apps.
I don't think it's as black and white as you're making out.
I would expect that not filtering ads (unless the user pays the content site) could be an enforceable stipulation to anyone using the APIs, no? I would also think that ads could be served through the common "get new posts" API in an opaque manner pretty easily.
To be fair, I don't think any of us know reddit's costs nor its revenue. We do know that the current CEO says that they are "not profitable". But let's just pretend for a minute that if reddit did what you say (scale down, stop the NFT TT bullshit) that they'd be a 'stable successful business'.
Ask yourself: Would YOU want to work for a company that's just eeking by, with limited growth or upward potential for your personal income? I sure as hell wouldn't. If reddit 'tried' to act like a co-operative they'd quickly lose the limited talent they do have to be replaced by "digital babysitters" who have the skills to reboot a server when it hangs and not much else. They certainly ain't going to attract the devs who can actually CREATE the mod tools that we've been after for YEARS.
At some point we need reddit and other sites like it to be profitable so that they can attract talent to continue to develop and expand the features of the site or else some other company will come along and do exactly that, putting reddit out of business.
Does reddit need to become profitable solely off the backs of API calls, no; which is why I'm here (and you too I assume) but we cannot pretend that any of this work is either easy or free to produce.
The obvious answer is "charge a reasonable price".
Many services like AccuWeather do that, including having a limited free tier for experimentation or niche applications.
The real problem though is that the value of the data isn't just the cost of storing and making it available - in many cases its strategic. This is why e.g. the Google Maps API gives you pre-rendered map tiles and curated results, but you don't get access to the raw data.
I think that's reasonable, which is why I'm wondering how "all APIs must be free" works.
Ads and also offer an ad-free option that gives you an API key. So, if you want to use a 3rd party app to skirt ads you'd still have to pay the website. I think charging the user is a much fairer system than charging developers for API access.