Following on the heels of Twitter’s resolution to limit third-party entry to its knowledge, Reddit at the moment announced that it’ll start charging to be used of its API.
It’s not a blanket coverage change. As reported by The New York Instances, Reddit’s API will stay free to builders who wish to construct apps and bots that assist folks use Reddit, in addition to to researchers who want to examine Reddit for strictly tutorial or noncommercial functions.
However firms that “crawl” Reddit for knowledge and “don’t return any of that worth” to customers should pay up,” Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman advised The Instances.
“It’s an excellent time for us to tighten issues up,” Huffman mentioned. “We expect that’s honest.”
The transfer comes as Reddit appears for tactics to monetize its huge array of user-generated content material, which as The Instances notes has been more and more used to coach high-profile, text-generating machine studying fashions comparable to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4. As of 2019, Reddit had over 430 million month-to-month energetic customers throughout greater than 1.2 million particular curiosity communities, 138,000 are active.
Huffman advised The Instances that he believes Reddit knowledge is especially precious as a result of it’s constantly up to date.
“The Reddit corpus of information is actually precious,” he reiterated. “Greater than some other place on the web, Reddit is a house for genuine dialog. There’s a whole lot of stuff on the location that you just’d solely ever say in remedy, or AA, or by no means in any respect … However we don’t want to present all of that worth to a few of the largest firms on this planet at no cost.”
Shareholders could possibly be the motivator. Reddit hasn’t introduced the main points of its API pricing but. However the firm is getting ready for a possible preliminary public providing someday later this yr, and buyers shall be on the lookout for development in — or totally new streams of — income.
Reddit, which was valued at round $10 billion in August 2021, is estimated to have made $350 million from adverts two years in the past. That whole pales compared to Meta’s and even Twitter’s advert revenues. Meta made $113 billion in 2022, whereas Twitter, regardless of its many controversies, raked in almost $7 billion.
In information associated to the API coverage change, Reddit at the moment mentioned that it hopes to include extra AI into how the location operates, comparable to figuring out the usage of AI-generated textual content on Reddit and including a label that notifies customers {that a} remark may’ve come from a bot. Reddit additionally goals to enhance its moderation instruments and the third-party bots that assist moderators monitor the boards.