Reddit today disclosed that it would start charging for its API, following Twitter’s decision to limit third-party access to its data.
It’s not a general policy adjustment. The New York Times it was noted that scholars who want to study Reddit for strictly academic or noncommercial purposes and developers who want to create apps and bots that assist users utilizing Reddit would continue to have access to Reddit’s API for free.
However, according to Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman, businesses that “crawl” Reddit for data and “don’t return any of that value” to users would be required to make payments. We should tighten things up now, according to Huffman. “We believe that is just.”
The decision was made when Reddit attempted to profit from its enormous library of user-generated content. As The Times points out, it has been increasingly utilized for training well-known, text-generating machine learning models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4. In addition, Reddit had over 430 million monthly active users as of 2019 and over 1.2 million active special interest communities.
Reddit data, according to Huffman, is particularly important because it is updated frequently, The Times reported.
He said again, “The Reddit corpus of data is incredibly valuable. “Reddit is a venue for real conversation more than any other website. So many things on the website are things you would only ever say in counseling, AA, or never at all. But we don’t have to provide some of the world’s biggest firms with all that value for nothing.
The drive could come from the shareholders. Reddit has not yet disclosed the specifics of its API pricing. However, the business is getting ready for a potential IPO later this year, and investors will be looking for increased revenue or altogether new sources of income.
Reddit, which had an estimated August 2021 market worth of $10 billion, is thought to have generated $350 million in advertising revenue two years prior. However, that sum is insignificant in light of Meta’s and even Twitter’s advertising revenues. In 2022, Meta earned $113 billion, while Twitter, despite its several issues, earned close to $7 billion.
Reddit today said it intends to integrate more AI into how the site functions, including identifying the use of AI-generated text on Reddit and adding a flag that alerts users that a bot may have remarked. This announcement is related to the change in API policy. Reddit also wants to enhance the third-party bots that assist moderators in keeping an eye on the forums and its moderating tools.
