I suspect that it’s not quite that simple. AFAIK, Reddit simply isn’t profitable, and they need to make it profitable. Or at least break even. Reverting to mean isn’t the answer, because they’d just keep losing money. But I don’t know what the real solution is. Obviously they advertise, but people using the non-official apps don’t see those, and people that use the old.reddit.com with layered ad blocking scripts also don’t see ads; that means those users are costing them money, and not earning them any money.
I don’t know what the solution is. Pissing off and losing a massive segment of your user base cuts costs, but also cuts your potential ad revenue.
Reddit should be like Wikipedia. Crowd sourced internet library/forum that begs for server costs a few times a year.
Agree but they lost good opportunities I think by not properly engaging with people like the Apollo developer. Someone who evidently understood their need to monetize their API etc but instead of thinking what’s reasonable they seemed to have pivoted to crazy.
There was surely a halfway house?
Pissing off and losing a massive segment of your user base cuts costs, but also cuts your potential ad revenue.
They’re gambling on it not hurting their potential ad revenue at all. They’ll try to bolster their ranks with new users who are just looking for content streams and start doing whatever they can to squeeze as much shareholder value out of them as possible.
