And Apollo makes money purely from being bought on the App Store, not from calling reddit's APIs. If I buy the app and never even open it, Apollo still makes $$$.
“Anyone” as in industry watchers making predictions based on all their knowledge of other similar services.
How much does Reddit pay content creators, again?
Yes they buy that product/business. And subsequently shutdown/merge. The point is, big companies uses their seemingly Massive marketing power to squeeze out competitors with superior products that may or may not rely on them to function. In the end, the market becomes less competitive because good small ones are gone, and big ones become complacent and arrogant (yeah we are too big to fail). End user will always be that loser.
That money is negligible. The problem is that Reddit loses more money because these clients don't include ads.
Lasted the lifetime of the app’s possibility of existence.
None of the major developers of reddit apps are saying the API should stay free. They’re saying it shouldn’t be an order of magnitude more expensive than what Reddit makes off of the average user, ADS INCLUDED. I believe the Apollo developer even said adding ads to the API calls was reasonable. It’s not his fault that Reddit never included this in their post fetching API.
Taylor Swift level rich? She is one of the richest people on the planet. Who gets that rich? The developer could have made millions or tens of millions making them in the top 0.1% of the US and 0.001% of the world. We dont know.
This is a pretty big point. It is just as likely that the models are scraping the site as it is they are calling API. Sure API would be more efficient but do you really think that any of those data vacuums will pay the API rate when they scrape for free. RPA and screen reading is not as efficient as bulk query of posts but it is free. If Apollo was going to run $20M / year for its API access then the sheer volume of calls by any of the LLMs would be astronomical. No one is paying that kind of fee for access to API at that scale.
LOL why the hostility to the dude? Ahhh I get it, you're jealous! So now to make yourself feel ok about your own timid, risk averse approach to life, you have to peddle the idea that what Reddit has done is perfectly reasonable and that the Apollo dev *deserved* to go out of business...which is a staggeringly naive and myopic view of how Reddit and businesses in general function.
To me Reddit remains a least a little more user-centric and actually on-topic, as opposed to the toxic cesspit from Hell that Twitter has become (to name just another social network).
The morals around this are pretty muddy, but what is 100% clear is that Apollo directly and indirectly made Reddit a better experience for everyone, and Reddit's crazy pricing policy has now directly made it a worse for everyone.
Twitter manually revoked API access to popular apps over the course of a day, it was not an automatic cutoff. They could not restart their apps even if they paid the outrageous API costs. It was two birds one stone.
Oh fun, hyperbole! Point is, his business depended entirely on another business who charged nothing for their API. Now they do and his business is forced to close. In most lines of work, if a supplier you work with folds or increases pricing, you could shop elsewhere. Selig doesn’t have that option.
They could charge double, but if consumers are dumb enough to keep paying, they reap what they sow.
