Reddit pulls a Twitter. Third Party Apps will cost some developers $20 MILLION/yr.

[AlTech]

52 minutes ago, Silentknyght said:

No, it does not.  Reddit does not provide an API to serve the ads.

Real talk, if they did I bet Reddit would charge for that too

[wanderingfool2]

1 hour ago, Silentknyght said:

No, it does not.  Reddit does not provide an API to serve the ads.

That doesn't matter, the fact is users of Apollo are not presented ads which is an opportunity cost lost.

 

1 hour ago, starsmine said:

Even if it did
Reddit with ads only makes 12 cents per active user per month of revenue. (this is a very generous estimate)

Asking apollo to pay 2.50 per user per month is 20x the cost. 
Apollo wasn't against paying for API access, apollo and other 3rd party clients were against paying 20x the revenue per user. 
Just giving allow the API to serve ads would not cover the 1/20th of cost that they are asking apollo to eat. 

"Very generous" based on what?  It's a private company who hasn't disclosed officially an audited financial sheet.

 

MAU's also vary depending on how Reddit is trying to define it; with some summing DAU's or basing off IP's etc.  So that number can drastically change just based off of that.

 

Per Selig's own admission to the media he says it would cost him $2m/month and as per his statement to TechCrunch he has 1.3 - 1.5 mill users.  So at BEST the API charge would equate to $1.53/user (Which conflicts with his statement of $2.50/user).  That's another reason why I think the Apollo dev is tweaking things to be in his favor; as his own numbers that he provides does not add up.  If he does have 1.5 active users the number drops to $1.34/user.

 

Take the time to actually understand that Apollo is only presenting an one sided argument and they present things in a way that doesn't necessarily correlate to reality.  At 900k DAU for Apollo, that means the users who spend the most time on reddit which would attribute to the most amount of ad revenue don't actually necessarily use Reddit themselves.  It's the old addage the ISP used to use, the top 1% of downloaders consumed over 50% of all traffic.

 

For example:

Apollo has 900k DAU (as per their statement to techcrunch)

Reddit has 36,000k DAU (as per apparent release based on some articles for 2019)

Assuming the 430,000k MAU (apparent 2019 numbers that Apollo used)

When you factor out repeat users (unique DAU + non unique) = DAU and (unique DAU * 30 + non unique) = MAU you get about 13,586k unique DAU (ones that don't really make much money because they are there for a short time) [Not 100% accurate but best what can be done with the current released figures]

That leaves Reddit at about 22.4m DAU of the users who use it daily (and not the one offs)

That means Apollo users represent 4% of all "Reddit users"

If you assume what Apollo said of $600M revenue, at $600m/0.96 = $625M or a delta of $25M per year. [Because the revenue profited from would be generated from the remainder]

 

And guess what; from the same figures that Apollo used that equates to about $2M per month.

[starsmine]

12 minutes ago, wanderingfool2 said:

"Very generous" based on what?  It's a private company who hasn't disclosed officially an audited financial sheet.

They disclosed it in 2020. 

https://www.redditinc.com/blog/reddit-secures-funding-to-continue-growth-plans/

This is Apollo's math
 

 

Quote

Hey all,

I'll cut to the chase: 50 million requests costs $12,000, a figure far more than I ever could have imagined.

Apollo made 7 billion requests last month, which would put it at about 1.7 million dollars per month, or 20 million US dollars per year. Even if I only kept subscription users, the average Apollo user uses 344 requests per day, which would cost $2.50 per month, which is over double what the subscription currently costs, so I'd be in the red every month.

I'm deeply disappointed in this price. Reddit iterated that the price would be A) reasonable and based in reality, and B) they would not operate like Twitter. Twitter's pricing was publicly ridiculed for its obscene price of $42,000 for 50 million tweets. Reddit's is still $12,000. For reference, I pay Imgur (a site similar to Reddit in user base and media) $166 for the same 50 million API calls.

As for the pricing, despite claims that it would be based in reality, it seems anything but. Less than 2 years ago they said they crossed $100M in quarterly revenue for the first time ever, if we assume despite the economic downturn that they've managed to do that every single quarter now, and for your best quarter, you've doubled it to $200M. Let's also be generous and go far, far above industry estimates and say you made another $50M in Reddit Premium subscriptions. That's $550M in revenue per year, let's say an even $600M. In 2019, they said they hit 430 million monthly active users, and to also be generous, let's say they haven't added a single active user since then (if we do revenue-per-user calculations, the more users, the less revenue each user would contribute). So at generous estimates of $600M and 430M monthly active users, that's $1.40 per user per year, or $0.12 monthly. These own numbers they've given are also seemingly inline with industry estimates as well.

For Apollo, the average user uses 344 requests daily, or 10.6K monthly. With the proposed API pricing, the average user in Apollo would cost $2.50, which is is 20x higher than a generous estimate of what each users brings Reddit in revenue.

While Reddit has been communicative and civil throughout this process with half a dozen phone calls back and forth that I thought went really well, I don't see how this pricing is anything based in reality or remotely reasonable. I hope it goes without saying that I don't have that kind of money or would even know how to charge it to a credit card.

This is going to require some thinking. I asked Reddit if they were flexible on this pricing or not, and they stated that it's their understanding that no, this will be the pricing, and I'm free to post the details of the call if I wish.

- Christian

(For the uninitiated wondering "what the heck is an API anyway and why is this so important?" it's just a fancy term for a way to access a site's information ("Application Programming Interface"). As an analogy, think of Reddit having a bouncer, and since day one that bouncer has been friendly, where if you ask "Hey, can you list out the comments for me for post X?" the bouncer would happily respond with what you requested, provided you didn't ask so often that it was silly. That's the Reddit API: I ask Reddit/the bouncer for some data, and it provides it so I can display it in my app for users. The proposed changes mean the bouncer will still exist, but now ask an exorbitant amount per question.)

Yes there are a lot of assumptions but EVERY assumption made is to make reddit's number(revenue per month per user) bigger. (increasing revenue, making user growth static)

Reddits revenue per user per quarter was 30cents beck in 2019
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/reddit-users-are-the-least-valuable-of-any-social-network.html
aka 10 cents per month. 

[wanderingfool2]

1 minute ago, starsmine said:

This is Apollo's math

Did you not read what I wrote about Apollo's "math".  Let me repeat using the numbers Apollo has given.

 

Apollo has 900k DAU (as per their statement to techcrunch)

Reddit has 36,000k DAU (as per apparent release based on some articles for 2019)

Assuming the 430,000k MAU (apparent 2019 numbers that Apollo used)

When you factor out repeat users (unique DAU + non unique) = DAU and (unique DAU * 30 + non unique) = MAU you get about 13,586k unique DAU (ones that don't really make much money because they are there for a short time) [Not 100% accurate but best what can be done with the current released figures]

That leaves Reddit at about 22.4m DAU of the users who use it daily (and not the one offs)

That means Apollo users represent 4% of all "Reddit users"

If you assume what Apollo said of $600M revenue, at $600m/0.96 = $625M or a delta of $25M per year. [Because the revenue profited from would be generated from the remainder]

 

Aside from the 36,000k DAU from reddit, the reset were numbers used by Apollo.  He did a flawed analysis

[starsmine]

7 minutes ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Did you not read what I wrote about Apollo's "math".  Let me repeat using the numbers Apollo has given.

 

Apollo has 900k DAU (as per their statement to techcrunch)

Reddit has 36,000k DAU (as per apparent release based on some articles for 2019)

Assuming the 430,000k MAU (apparent 2019 numbers that Apollo used)

When you factor out repeat users (unique DAU + non unique) = DAU and (unique DAU * 30 + non unique) = MAU you get about 13,586k unique DAU (ones that don't really make much money because they are there for a short time) [Not 100% accurate but best what can be done with the current released figures]

That leaves Reddit at about 22.4m DAU of the users who use it daily (and not the one offs)

That means Apollo users represent 4% of all "Reddit users"

If you assume what Apollo said of $600M revenue, at $600m/0.96 = $625M or a delta of $25M per year. [Because the revenue profited from would be generated from the remainder]

 

Aside from the 36,000k DAU from reddit, the reset were numbers used by Apollo.  He did a flawed analysis

If apollo was costing reddit 25m per year

They should just take the deal apollo offered, 10m to buy them out. 
That isn't black mail, that is giving reddit a penny on the dollar deal. 

The two blackout days has already cost them 3m, and given how many reddits plan to stay down for a while, reddit will probably lose another 10 before the month is out.  

[wanderingfool2]

3 minutes ago, starsmine said:

If apollo was costing reddit 25m per year

They should just take the deal apollo offered, 10m to buy them out. 
That isn't black mail, that is giving reddit a penny on the dollar deal. 

That's looking at things in just the perspective that Apollo is saying.  People don't get to have it both ways of Apollo clearly joking while making a serious proposition.

 

I've already discussed why you wouldn't buy an app like Apollo, when as a company you already have an official app.

 

People are using blackmail and threat without understanding what was being said though.  I've never said it was blackmail, I have said however the way thigns were phrased I understand how it could be percieved as a threat made by Apollo.

[cmndr]

On 5/31/2023 at 2:05 PM, BondiBlue said:

I like the concept of Reddit, but the people running it just have no clue what their users actually want.

San Francisco progressives. 

 

They assume that users want whatever will make them popular in their little circle of friends. 

 

[starsmine]

1 minute ago, wanderingfool2 said:

That's looking at things in just the perspective that Apollo is saying.  People don't get to have it both ways of Apollo clearly joking while making a serious proposition.

 

I've already discussed why you wouldn't buy an app like Apollo, when as a company you already have an official app.

 

People are using blackmail and threat without understanding what was being said though.  I've never said it was blackmail, I have said however the way thigns were phrased I understand how it could be percieved as a threat made by Apollo.

Because it was a joke, apollo doesnt actually want to sell.
But buying out apps like that is just normal business. 

Calling it blackmail is insane because
a
its normal business
b
he didn't want to sell. 

I didn't call it blackmail there, I said reddit should have taken him up on it. 

[Arika]

On 6/11/2023 at 6:09 AM, LAwLz said:

According to the AMA

oh man, that AMA was such bullshit.

 

1. They made an announcement about doing a Q&A with the CEO (spez) about the new changes the day prior
2. the make the post outlining the "new" changes
3. 33.7k comments on the post
4. spez responds to 14 of them.....are you fucking serious?
5. doesn't answer any real questions, just the ones that he can fluff about with

[Kisai]

On 6/12/2023 at 10:09 AM, wanderingfool2 said:

 

 

And as an fyi, remember Reddit's is supposedly $12k per 50M, lets look at something like Google Maps.

 

500k = $840 (Maps static API) [or $84,000 per 50M]

500k = $2917 (Maps JS API) [or $2.9m per 50M]

 

Or you know lets look at bing's search API pricing

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/pricing

1k = $15 (Bing Web Search) [$750k / 50M]

 

The trouble is people like you are blinded by what they THINK is the answer without thinking what is being said as the argument.  You are more than welcome to go look at page 2 where I clearly stated what my approximated numbers were based on what I could find of the public numbers [while stating that it's a private company so we can only guess at certain things

 

Google Maps and Bing Search are not even remotely close to the API reddit may or may not have.

Maps requires a LOT of computational processing and is not even remotely in the same data processing type. 

 

The closest comparison for reddit and twitter is the search function on THIS site. It sure doesn't cost LMG more than a few pennies a year to have a search function.

 

The reason why certain API's can be "priced upwards" is there's no bounds on the data. Like the kind of fair comparison would be Google's https://cloud.google.com/api-gateway/pricing API pricing. 6-11 cents per GB, and 1.0 million API calls costs $1.50, when the volume is in the billions. so 50M api calls is $75.

 

And the thing that both Reddit and Twitter make a fatal mistake about is that their services are "necessary" for the operation of the internet. That someone won't just make a new site that doesn't have this crippling baggage.

 

It's actually super sad about the state of things with Twitter, because it went from being useful, that everyone wants to integrate with, to being absolutely useless and a liability to use.

 

Discord is currently eating everyone's lunch, despite making very stupid mistakes itself.

[wanderingfool2]

4 hours ago, Kisai said:

Google Maps and Bing Search are not even remotely close to the API reddit may or may not have.

Maps requires a LOT of computational processing and is not even remotely in the same data processing type. 

 

The closest comparison for reddit and twitter is the search function on THIS site. It sure doesn't cost LMG more than a few pennies a year to have a search function.

 

The reason why certain API's can be "priced upwards" is there's no bounds on the data. Like the kind of fair comparison would be Google's https://cloud.google.com/api-gateway/pricing API pricing. 6-11 cents per GB, and 1.0 million API calls costs $1.50, when the volume is in the billions. so 50M api calls is $75.

 

And the thing that both Reddit and Twitter make a fatal mistake about is that their services are "necessary" for the operation of the internet. That someone won't just make a new site that doesn't have this crippling baggage.

 

It's actually super sad about the state of things with Twitter, because it went from being useful, that everyone wants to integrate with, to being absolutely useless and a liability to use.

 

Discord is currently eating everyone's lunch, despite making very stupid mistakes itself.

Did you read the first sentence of my post?  It is foolish to just associate an API call with the "cost" of the actual call.  I can 100% guarantee that for Google and Microsoft those API calls I mentioned no not require too many extra resources in the grand scheme of things than what Reddit pays, instead the pricing is based on cost opportunity.

 

To make an example of the extreme, because people don't seem to get it.  Imagine if all of Reddit used Apollo instead of Reddit's app.  Instantly their revenue would dry up.  They wouldn't just charge the price of the API, but the general opportunity cost for the value of the user.

 

Also, Twitter was losing money, so that effectively meant the investors were fronting the operation costs of things like API's.

 

Twitter and Reddit are not in it for charity, at the end of the day they need to make money.  They likely could make more money by selling the user data, but that I think is worse than just charging for an API.

 

Again, based on the information that is provided there is a chance that the cost of their API matches what the opportunity cost is of those users.

 

6 hours ago, starsmine said:

Calling it blackmail is insane because
a
its normal business
b
he didn't want to sell. 

What is insane is people constantly bringing up the whole "blackmail" and "threats" comments without consideration to the context of what was said.

 

First, normal business is NOT joking after someone literally says they want to take all comments seriously.

Normal business is NOT using the phrase " And have Apollo quiet down, you know, six months" in a conversation where moments prior you were told the phone was cutting off.

 

On Reddit's end I 100% agree how it could have come off as a threat.  I've at least listened into enough corporate calls to know that sometimes those "jokes" and double meanings of certain phrases are used to gauge or yes threaten actions.

 

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Did you read the first sentence of my post?  It is foolish to just associate an API call with the "cost" of the actual call. 

Sorry no. API calls and Data transfer are separate, and they are on nowhere in the realm of what twitter or reddit is asking. Google's maps requires actual computation because maps are not indexes. If I ask for a map of zip code 12345, a server has to figure out the landscape boundaries are for zip 12345, and apply dozens of layers on top of it.

 

A Reddit or twitter API is nothing more than "serve me this tweet/post/comment, from X user" repeated dozens of times. There's nothing complicated. Twitter and reddit has more in common with php-based forums than they do mapping programs, and it's dishonest to suggest otherwise.

 

1 hour ago, wanderingfool2 said:

 

To make an example of the extreme, because people don't seem to get it.  Imagine if all of Reddit used Apollo instead of Reddit's app.  Instantly their revenue would dry up.  They wouldn't just charge the price of the API, but the general opportunity cost for the value of the user.

 

 

So? Reddit does not own it's users or the data posted by it's users. Neither does Twitter. As much as they would like to suggest they own the data, they do not. Those people posting on those site can post the content somewhere else and link back to twitter as a courtesy for people who use that platform.

 

Can't rely on anything you don't control. 

[Strobel]

Won't be missed when it inevitably fails.

[rcmaehl]

15 hours ago, Arika S said:

oh man, that AMA was such bullshit.

 

1. They made an announcement about doing a Q&A with the CEO (spez) about the new changes the day prior
2. the make the post outlining the "new" changes
3. 33.7k comments on the post
4. spez responds to 14 of them.....are you fucking serious?
5. doesn't answer any real questions, just the ones that he can fluff about with

You missed the part where he accidentally left Answer: <generic bullshit> in one of his replies. Basically confirming he was copying and pasting from an existing pre-written answer sheet

[Qyygle]

10 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Did you read the first sentence of my post?  It is foolish to just associate an API call with the "cost" of the actual call.  I can 100% guarantee that for Google and Microsoft those API calls I mentioned no not require too many extra resources in the grand scheme of things than what Reddit pays, instead the pricing is based on cost opportunity.

Spoiler

To make an example of the extreme, because people don't seem to get it.  Imagine if all of Reddit used Apollo instead of Reddit's app.  Instantly their revenue would dry up.  They wouldn't just charge the price of the API, but the general opportunity cost for the value of the user.

 

Also, Twitter was losing money, so that effectively meant the investors were fronting the operation costs of things like API's.

 

Twitter and Reddit are not in it for charity, at the end of the day they need to make money.  They likely could make more money by selling the user data, but that I think is worse than just charging for an API.

 

Again, based on the information that is provided there is a chance that the cost of their API matches what the opportunity cost is of those users.

 

What is insane is people constantly bringing up the whole "blackmail" and "threats" comments without consideration to the context of what was said.

 

First, normal business is NOT joking after someone literally says they want to take all comments seriously.

Normal business is NOT using the phrase " And have Apollo quiet down, you know, six months" in a conversation where moments prior you were told the phone was cutting off.

 

On Reddit's end I 100% agree how it could have come off as a threat.  I've at least listened into enough corporate calls to know that sometimes those "jokes" and double meanings of certain phrases are used to gauge or yes threaten actions.

 

See, the problem here is you're arguing from a business perspective. The same kind of perspective which is why people are mad in the first place.

 

You're coming from the point of view of soley min-maxing $'s. This is the same kind of arguement a lot of climate deniers make when say, arguing the cost of say... stopping global climate change. Can we put a price on keeping the climate stable for future generations? Not really. But it's very easy to come up with a cost for Not drilling that oil pit, and claiming the massive losses you'd be incurring for keeping it in the ground.

 

Did you account for the 'cost opportunity' of Reddit's millions of users and moderators freely adding their content and services to make the site the place it is today? At the end of the day, alienating these people is certainly going to offset whatever 'cost opportunity' you gain by min-maxing your API pricing.

Literally killing the golden goose here.

[wanderingfool2]

8 hours ago, Kisai said:

Sorry no. API calls and Data transfer are separate, and they are on nowhere in the realm of what twitter or reddit is asking. Google's maps requires actual computation because maps are not indexes. If I ask for a map of zip code 12345, a server has to figure out the landscape boundaries are for zip 12345, and apply dozens of layers on top of it.

Please take the time to comprehend what I'm saying.

 

Those "processing costs" and all that are dirt cheap compared to the grand scale of things.  It's foolish to keep comparing a SINGULAR part of a cost and blather on about that it costs more process....when those processing costs make up a small fraction of the costs of what goes into the API calls.

 

To make the example extreme again:

Imagine I create a website that specializes in cataloging insects, where there is an API to retrieve the picture; and say you have 10,000 users.  The actual VPS that you could use to host that could cost less than $200/year...after all it's just retrieving images.  Yet for API access you wouldn't charge $0.02/user, you would charge more because it doesn't factor in the cost of you driving to locations, purchasing of the camera, depretiation of the work vehicle, salaries etc.

 

The simple fact is the cost to actually process the API call is miniscule in comparison.  At that stage we are effectively talking about other costs or other potential revenues.

 

8 hours ago, Kisai said:

A Reddit or twitter API is nothing more than "serve me this tweet/post/comment, from X user" repeated dozens of times. There's nothing complicated. Twitter and reddit has more in common with php-based forums than they do mapping programs, and it's dishonest to suggest otherwise.

Then show stats of others that you find comparable.  Let me guess you can't, not for sites that make a profit from displaying ads.  As a whole the cost of the API is small compared to other costs, to ignore that kind of fact is the dishonest part.

 

It's the same dishonest argument of bringing up the LTT as an example, LTT forum is effectively subsidized.

 

The reddit/Twitter API would still take into account things like the timeline which matches preferences; it needs to categorize based on upvotes etc.   It's not as rudimentary as you are claiming either.

 

What is dishonest is saying that things like twitter API's are cheap.  As a whole Twitter lost money in the majority of the years they operated.  With 353.90 MAU, and .  Twitter had 353.90 MAU, and pre-tax expense $5.491B.  That's as an expense is $15/MAU user...for just Twitter.

 

9 hours ago, Kisai said:

So? Reddit does not own it's users or the data posted by it's users. Neither does Twitter. As much as they would like to suggest they own the data, they do not. Those people posting on those site can post the content somewhere else and link back to twitter as a courtesy for people who use that platform.

 

Can't rely on anything you don't control. 

You have to be arguing in bad faith or are you seriously not capable of understanding the concept I presented.  If you do an extreme example of Apollo having all the users, Reddit would then make no money for charging "cost" of just the API call.

 

The user data on Twitter is monetizable if they chose to do so.  It's like trying to argue that Facebook doesn't own it's users data.  The fact is Facebook monetizes it to a crazy degree.

 

11 minutes ago, Qyygle said:

See, the problem here is you're arguing from a business perspective. The same kind of perspective which is why people are mad in the first place.

Apollo's dev is the one who tried analyzing it from the flawed business perspective where he comes up with I think a faulty number.

 

It's like me saying "Apollo has 1.5 million users, he's just using the free Reddit API up  until this point, so he is raking in $2.25 million a month; he's a rich snob who just wants things for free".  You can't just magically ignore costs and lost revenue because it suits you.

 

As I stated Apollo would be making up about 4% of the active Reddit users (the ones that do make money for the company).  That's not a trivial amount of users to ignore.

 

Reddit is not a charity,

[Qyygle]

5 minutes ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Please take the time to comprehend what I'm saying.

 

Those "processing costs" and all that are dirt cheap compared to the grand scale of things.  It's foolish to keep comparing a SINGULAR part of a cost and blather on about that it costs more process....when those processing costs make up a small fraction of the costs of what goes into the API calls.

 

To make the example extreme again:

Imagine I create a website that specializes in cataloging insects, where there is an API to retrieve the picture; and say you have 10,000 users.  The actual VPS that you could use to host that could cost less than $200/year...after all it's just retrieving images.  Yet for API access you wouldn't charge $0.02/user, you would charge more because it doesn't factor in the cost of you driving to locations, purchasing of the camera, depretiation of the work vehicle, salaries etc.

 

The simple fact is the cost to actually process the API call is miniscule in comparison.  At that stage we are effectively talking about other costs or other potential revenues.

 

...

 

As I stated Apollo would be making up about 4% of the active Reddit users (the ones that do make money for the company).  That's not a trivial amount of users to ignore.

 

Reddit is not a charity,

This is kind of the point.

Reddit's value is not provided by Reddit the company. This is literally a forum that users are contributing all the content. Reddit is Literally Just retrieving the picture, the post, whatever.

They Have No Content of their own.

In your example, it'd be the users were the ones collectively contributing photos and providing the scientific knowledge to catalog species, but then one day, you decide to cut everyone off, and charge for both access to the catalog, and for 'premium' account status for the ability to moderate/edit. 

Without the direct knowledge or ability to maintain the catalog, who will update the photos to keep up with changes? Who will add tags to new photos that aren't coming in, because nobody is adding new ones? Now you need to hire people to do the work that was voluntary before. Now you need to buy the cars, the cameras, the housing to have staff go out and keep up the input. You need to hire scientific experts, who are able to maintain the database and classification tags. Whereas before, you paid $200/year + your own hosting/maintenance costs, now you are paying a small company's worth of staff to obtain content that was previously given to you, and at the end, you still end up with nobody using the site because of bridges burned.

 

[wanderingfool2]

9 minutes ago, Qyygle said:

This is kind of the point.

Reddit's value is not provided by Reddit the company. This is literally a forum that users are contributing all the content. Reddit is Literally Just retrieving the picture, the post, whatever.

They Have No Content of their own.

In your example, it'd be the users were the ones collectively contributing photos and providing the scientific knowledge to catalog species, but then one day, you decide to cut everyone off, and charge for both access to the catalog, and for 'premium' account status for the ability to moderate/edit. 

Without the direct knowledge or ability to maintain the catalog, who will update the photos to keep up with changes? Who will add tags to new photos that aren't coming in, because nobody is adding new ones? Now you need to hire people to do the work that was voluntary before. Now you need to buy the cars, the cameras, the housing to have staff go out and keep up the input. You need to hire scientific experts, who are able to maintain the database and classification tags. Whereas before, you paid $200/year + your own hosting/maintenance costs, now you are paying a small company's worth of staff to obtain content that was previously given to you, and at the end, you still end up with nobody using the site because of bridges burned.

 

You are still missing the point then.

 

Let me say this in one sentence

 

You cannot judge a service of a company soley on the cost of said service.

 

That is what you guys are effectively trying to do by making the argument that the cost for an API must be low.  The bridge is only getting burned here because Apollo came out with what amounts to an insanely biased analysis.  His cost analysis could be wrong, stating it only cost Reddit 0.14/month.  As I've said, based on the MAU and how many users Apollo claimed to have Reddit's "cost" was actually close to what he would be charged.

[Qyygle]

44 minutes ago, wanderingfool2 said:

You are still missing the point then.

 

Let me say this in one sentence

 

You cannot judge a service of a company soley on the cost of said service.

 

That is what you guys are effectively trying to do by making the argument that the cost for an API must be low.  The bridge is only getting burned here because Apollo came out with what amounts to an insanely biased analysis.  His cost analysis could be wrong, stating it only cost Reddit 0.14/month.  As I've said, based on the MAU and how many users Apollo claimed to have Reddit's "cost" was actually close to what he would be charged.

I honestly don't know if it's worth continuing this back and forth, since it seems you're pretty stuck on your opinion. 

That statement is ludicrous. What else do you judge it on? The quality? Reddit's already proven their own apps are much worse in quality. The reliability? They couldn't even keep their own page up when everyone went dark. The community? The one that's actively protesting their decisions?

What is left? 

 

But very simply, Sure. Let's say I agree. If Reddit's cost to allow Apollo to continue to run as is, amounts to what they're actually charging him, to be frank, they have much more serious problems on the backend.

Crazy management/scaling issues, at that point, based on what's achievable for other sites. Perhaps they deserve what's coming to them if this is the case.

[wanderingfool2]

12 minutes ago, Qyygle said:

I honestly don't know if it's worth continuing this back and forth, since it seems you're pretty stuck on your opinion. 

That statement is ludicrous. What else do you judge it on? The quality? Reddit's already proven their own apps are much worse in quality. The reliability? They couldn't even keep their own page up when everyone went dark. The community? The one that's actively protesting their decisions?

What is left? 

 

But very simply, Sure. Let's say I agree. If Reddit's cost to allow Apollo to continue to run as is, amounts to what they're actually charging him, to be frank, they have much more serious problems on the backend.

Crazy management/scaling issues, at that point, based on what's achievable for other sites. Perhaps they deserve what's coming to them if this is the case.

It's not ludicrous, it's that you don't understand the basics of businesses needing to make a profit.

 

It's like whining that a heavily engineered piece of equipment that comprises of only $10 in materials should only be charging $10 for it.  Or to put it in a real world example, the LTT screwdriver only has a cost in terms of materials therefore it's a rip off at $69.  Ignoring the fact that they are looking to make a profit off of it and the capital cost to actually initially create it is not a prudent thing to do.

 

Under the logic everyone is applying here to Reddit, I can easily say Apollo is gouging their customers for $1.50 a month because if they claim Reddit's only making 0.14/user, then I can make the same inference and say that Apollo is charging 10x the cost.

 

Everyone keeps saying things like similar services don't charge that amount...and yet no one seems to point to a similar company that is profitable.  (Facebook wouldn't count because they essentially make a bulk of their money by scraping user data)

[Blademaster91]

1 hour ago, wanderingfool2 said:

You are still missing the point then.

 

Let me say this in one sentence

 

You cannot judge a service of a company soley on the cost of said service.

 

That is what you guys are effectively trying to do by making the argument that the cost for an API must be low.  The bridge is only getting burned here because Apollo came out with what amounts to an insanely biased analysis.  His cost analysis could be wrong, stating it only cost Reddit 0.14/month.  As I've said, based on the MAU and how many users Apollo claimed to have Reddit's "cost" was actually close to what he would be charged.

You're only seeing it from a business perspective, and possibly coming off as defending reddit and their API cost, which is why people are disagreeing with you.  I don't use the reddit app, or the mobile version of the app, and i'm not an active user either. The most I use reddit for is to google a tech issue and see if people are having the same problem. However i've seen lots of comments saying using the reddit site and the app are both terrible. If reddit can't compete with 3rd party tools then the solution would be pretty simple for a large company, come up with a competing solution, or hire devs from a 3rd party app developer.

[wanderingfool2]

10 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

If reddit can't compete with 3rd party tools then the solution would be pretty simple for a large company, come up with a competing solution, or hire devs from a 3rd party app developer.

Well if it only relates to 4%, then it's not necesarily about just changing their app to "compete".  It's also harder to compete against apps without ads on them.

 

11 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

You're only seeing it from a business perspective, and possibly coming off as defending reddit and their API cost, which is why people are disagreeing with you.

The Apollo dev is the one who tried using the cost per user, the Apollo dev is the one who also incorrectly assessed the situation

The way I look at it, from what I have seen the Apollo dev seems to be a lot more skeevy.

 

Again, I used Apollo's numbers and it came to a completely different cost that what people are mindlessly quoting of like 0.14 per user and things like that.

 

People keep inserting the blackmail/threat as though Apollo was innocent, yet again from what I read the transcript if I were sitting on that call I could perceivably call it a threat.

 

 

[Kisai]

8 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Please take the time to comprehend what I'm saying.

 

Those "processing costs" and all that are dirt cheap compared to the grand scale of things.  It's foolish to keep comparing a SINGULAR part of a cost and blather on about that it costs more process....when those processing costs make up a small fraction of the costs of what goes into the API calls.

It costs fragments of pennies to send a HTTP request. That is all "API" is. The most amount of data you get back from an API is about 30KB. You get back XML or JSON that then something in CLIENT processes to ask for additional HTTP requests to API or image resources. The only thing that comes back over the API is text.

 

It's is completely dishonest to say that "API costs" are what twitter and reddit are asking, when clearly Amazon and Google say it's closer to $10 and they operate at a premium. Whatever they are asking, the actual cost is 1/10th of that or less.

 

 

 

8 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Then show stats of others that you find comparable.  Let me guess you can't, not for sites that make a profit from displaying ads.  As a whole the cost of the API is small compared to other costs, to ignore that kind of fact is the dishonest part.

Go look at the statistics for ANY web server. What is the actual cost of a server versus the amount of http requests it makes? A 99$ bare metal server running just NGINX as as front-end over dozens, if not hundreds of back-end servers still costs $99 regardless of how many servers are behind it. API costs are not "expensed" as individual calls, they are expensed in computational power. Whatever scripting language the server behind it runs to turn it into XML or JSON, is at most, inconsequential amounts of CPU power compared to the static assets (eg images) that reddit doesn't even have and has been relying on imgur for.

 

Like I have to say again, the only thing reddit "has" is text. It does not own the text. It only has permission to publish it.

 

 

8 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

It's the same dishonest argument of bringing up the LTT as an example, LTT forum is effectively subsidized.

 

No, it's completely fair. LTT is a forum, it has images,  (which reddit doesn't) and avatar profiles, and all the other bells and whistles reddit has. And it runs on likely just ONE server and costs likely $50/mo to run. I sincerely doubt they are spending amazon-levels of money on the CDN or they would just shut it down.

 

 

 

8 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

The reddit/Twitter API would still take into account things like the timeline which matches preferences; it needs to categorize based on upvotes etc.   It's not as rudimentary as you are claiming either.

 

None of this matters. The API is not deciding what to send the client. The client is. The client goes "give me tweet #123334555676536345" and it gets tweet 123334555676536345. API's purposes are to send what is asked, not filter, sort or algorithmically muck with the results, because that would incur processing costs on the server that the client should be doing.

 

I'll give you a direct example, I wrote an API program the other day for a client. the server it accesses times out after every 8KB. So I had to make the program connect retrieve things until it disconnects, and then reconnect, picking up on a client-sided pagination scheme to decide where to start again.

 

When you communicate with the API, it's sending only what it's asked for, nothing else. To do otherwise is to not understand what the API is for.

 

 

8 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

What is dishonest is saying that things like twitter API's are cheap.  As a whole Twitter lost money in the majority of the years they operated.  With 353.90 MAU, and .  Twitter had 353.90 MAU, and pre-tax expense $5.491B.  That's as an expense is $15/MAU user...for just Twitter.

None of this matters. You want API access to a data store, you pay for how much it costs to retrieve the required data. Retrieving user authentication credentials involves more processing by invoking encryption and session state management than simply going "give me a tweet/reddit post"

 

 

8 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

 

You have to be arguing in bad faith or are you seriously not capable of understanding the concept I presented.  If you do an extreme example of Apollo having all the users, Reddit would then make no money for charging "cost" of just the API call.

 

No, you're the one who seems to not understand anything. If you want to argue that twitter or reddit should charge extortionate amounts of money to access what is free to process and transfer, then you are failing to recognize that this data is already free to process and transfer from the web browser. If you're just going to compete with yourself. 

 

The reason API's exist is so that people don't have to write site-scraping tools at your expense. Google is the biggest site-scraper there is, and yet routinely certain parts of the internet (eg newspapers) seem to misunderstand the role google plays. Google is enabling discovery of their sites and articles, and should be charging THEM money, not the other way around. Google has thus far not, and because the newspapers want google to pay them, Google is more than happy to just cut them off.

 

So if I want to keep reading the poor quality newspapers in Canada or Australia, I would have to bookmark them, because google will just hide them due to this silly nonsense.

 

And that is where Reddit and Twitter do not understand the role they have here. If I want to find a tweet, and you don't give me API access, and you nerf the search system to make it hard to find a tweet, than I'm going to go to google and have google find it. It costs reddit and twitter more money to have google constantantly scraping them than it would to offer free or at-cost API access. But google isn't going to pay for API access to any site that isn't free, because google doesn't charge money to use search. There is no way to pass on that cost to everyone, even those who aren't looking for twitter or reddit posts. 

 

Ask anyone who has ever started a website, what happened when google indexed it. Chances are the story was "it made the site inaccessible for hours", because many cheap hosting plans do not have caching mechanisms, and many low quality CMS systems (eg wordpress) don't come with them, so it's very expensive to process even basic requests.

 

If it was possible to just get an API call to "give me the most recent story" that costs 1KB of data, instead of the maybe 8MB of data, text, images, ads, scripts, css, etc the page might load just to load one story.

 

The API is a way to save money for the host, NOT the client.

 

 

[wanderingfool2]

3 hours ago, Kisai said:

It's is completely dishonest to say that "API costs" are what twitter and reddit are asking, when clearly Amazon and Google say it's closer to $10 and they operate at a premium. Whatever they are asking, the actual cost is 1/10th of that or less.

Again you are lacking a basics of business in cost analysis.

 

Answer this, if all users used Apollo instead of reddit, what would Reddit's advertising revenue be?

 

It's stupid to just compare cost to how much they would lets say rent a server for.  You have to include the potential loss of revenue.  Otherwise like in my extreme example, if Apollo had lets say 100% of Reddit users, reddit would bear pretty much all the cost without revenue.
 

3 hours ago, Kisai said:

No, it's completely fair. LTT is a forum, it has images,  (which reddit doesn't) and avatar profiles, and all the other bells and whistles reddit has. And it runs on likely just ONE server and costs likely $50/mo to run. I sincerely doubt they are spending amazon-levels of money on the CDN or they would just shut it down.

lol, and this is exactly why so many businesses fail because people like you just assume "costs" means the price of equipment.  I guarantee the total expenses to operate this server cost over $50/month when you start factoring in employee salaries and time spent on the forum.

 

I think Linus even addressed it on a WAN show before that the forum doesn't make them any money or that they end up paying more to keep it up (with the minimal ads they have); iirc they see it more as a community thing though which is why they keep it going.

 

That is why you cannot compare the two, as they ARE NOT in it to have the forum make money.  Reddit pretty much makes their money from users interacting with it, so again you have to assess potential revenue loss by having people not using your app.

 

4 hours ago, Kisai said:

None of this matters. You want API access to a data store, you pay for how much it costs to retrieve the required data. Retrieving user authentication credentials involves more processing by invoking encryption and session state management than simply going "give me a tweet/reddit post"

Are you trying to be dense in regards to this?  Of course it matters.  If Twitter has x amount of users and it costs them z dollars then you would have to be very naive to say that the API doesn't cost them anything more than the server costs.

 

4 hours ago, Kisai said:

No, you're the one who seems to not understand anything. If you want to argue that twitter or reddit should charge extortionate amounts of money to access what is free to process and transfer, then you are failing to recognize that this data is already free to process and transfer from the web browser. If you're just going to compete with yourself. 

Keep asking for handouts

 

Their TOS also likely have things mentioning web scraping, which if used for commercial purposes would be a violation.

 

Simple fact TWITTER was not making money, it's so asinine to start saying charging exorbitant amounts for a company that doesn't make money. 

[Qyygle]

44 minutes ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Again you are lacking a basics of business in cost analysis.

And again... you're missing their point.

At this point it's unlikely you'll get it, just as Reddit doesn't seem likely to pull out of their dumb decision.

 

Steve Huffman, is that you?