Following Twitter’s move to limit access to its data by third parties, Reddit has stated that it would begin charging for access to its application programming interface (API).
This is not an overhaul of the entire policy. According to The New York Times, access to Reddit’s application programming interface (API) will continue to be free for developers creating Reddit-related applications and bots and for scholars studying Reddit for non-commercial purposes.
Reddit tightens things up
Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman told The Times that the company will begin charging businesses who “crawl” Reddit for data but “don’t provide any of that value” to users.
“We need to tighten things up,” Huffman added. “It seems reasonable to us.”
The move comes as Reddit seeks to commercialize its massive repository of user-generated material, which, as The Times points out, is increasingly being used to train prominent text-generating ML models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4. In 2019, Reddit boasted over 430 million active members over over 1.2 million niche groups, of which 138,000 were actively posting.
Huffman told The Times that the constantly updated data on Reddit is particularly significant.
He highlighted again how crucial the Reddit data corpus is. Reddit, more than anywhere else on the web, is where real conversations take place. A lot of the site’s content is the kind of thing you wouldn’t normally discuss outside of counseling, AA, or never. But we don’t have to hand over all of that value for nothing to some of the biggest firms in the world.
Reddit API price
The motivation may come from the shareholders. Reddit’s API price information is still unknown. But, the business is gearing up for an IPO later this year, and investors will be looking for signs of revenue growth or the introduction of wholly new income sources.
It is projected that two years ago, Reddit generated $350 million through advertisements, contributing to its roughly $10 billion valuation in August 2021. Ad income on Meta and even Twitter dwarfs that amount. Although Meta made $113 billion in 2022, Twitter only made almost $7 billion despite all of its scandals.
In light of the new API policy, Reddit has announced plans to increase the usage of artificial intelligence across the site, including the detection of AI-produced text and the introduction of a label informing users that a remark may have been generated by a bot. In addition, Reddit is working to enhance its moderating features and the third-party bots that assist with forum surveillance.
