The bad, although expected news is that according to Similarweb via Gizmodo Reddit traffic is back to pre-protest levels. The caveat is that some of the traffic might still indicate protests, (i.e. John Oliver pics). Most interesting:
However, Similarweb told Gizmodo traffic to the ads.reddit.com portal, where advertisers can buy ads and measure their impact, has dipped. Before the first blackout began, the ads site averaged about 14,900 visits per day. Beginning on June 13, though, the ads site averaged about 11,800 visits per day, a 20% decrease.
For June 20 and 21, the most recent days for which Similarweb has estimates, the ads site got in the range of 7,500 to 9,000 visits, Carr explained, meaning that ad-buying traffic has continued to drop.>>>
Can you actually backup that “There are apps going to pay”? Because I’ve seen users say they’d pay, but no apps say the same.
And lol, if you think the API is cost intensive, you don’t understand the costs inherent to alternatives to an API. It’s much more cost efficient to provide an API that you can effectively limit and use minimal resources to respond to a query vs web scraping which is objectively more resource intensive (with the webpage overhead the API doesn’t have) and doesn’t have nearly as good rate limiting or the protections an API has.
Apps using reddit’s API (e.g. Apollo) don’t display reddit’s ads. Imagine you run a bar & serve free beer. You can do this with this one simple trick: constantly spamming ads on every TV (display panel) in your bar. Advertisers pay for the beer & your overheads.
Along comes a guy with a garden hose, sticks it in your keg, and starts siphoning your beer to the bar he built across the street. His place is much better than yours, the alcoholics don’t have to watch ads to get drunk.
wat do?
Pretty sure app devs are not not_scraping out of concern for reddit. If they could, they would (I know I would).
Fairly certain RIF scrapes. That’s why it grabs “pages” of content. Beyond that, most reasonable folks don’t think the API needs to continue to be free. It’s just ridiculously cost prohibitive. Many services offer APIs that cost money. It’s just Reddit’s costs aren’t based in a reality dictated by cost. It’s created to force large apps offline. We’ll see how long infinity lasts. It’ll likely cost significantly more than reddit premium. Wouldn’t be surprised if it’s 50% more.
So API not an issue?
Sure, 3rd party apps break reddit’s business model.
In regards to business model, not really. They’re literally changing their business model from the ground up. You can’t “break” something that doesn’t exist yet. They could have offered reasonable API costs. They did not. They could easily monetize third party apps. It’s clear however that spez is just a jealous shithead. He’s upset they made profit when he didn’t and doesn’t like that someone found a way to be profitable. Reddit could have offered the same features and app reliability. They did not.
Scraping is very easily blocked which is likely what they’ll do if forced to do so. They are probably just including scraping clauses in their agreements. So RIF will have to adhere to those agreements because they’ll probably have to accept them to even gain access. St that point it’s a legal mire. If they want to avoid court, it could just be an arms war. Scraping is extremely easily broken and would constantly need updating. It’s not cost effective from a developer point of view.