Its been some time since xitter, reddit, and other sites began paywalling their API, causing third party integrations and apps to collapse.
I’m wondering, did any of these sites end up with paying customers for the API? Are there examples of third parties paying to continue their services? These sites sacrificed massive amounts of community and developer good will to privatize the internet - how did it work out for them long term?
I think one of the major reasons they wanted to close the free APIs was to prevent data scraping for AI models without paying the big dollars. Of course that also meant users would be limited to the service’s own apps with their own ads so it’s a bit of a win-win for them.
I’d imagine the only people paying the insane API prices are the AI/ML companies (edit: like google with its Reddit deal)
You can still scrape Reddit without the api. Main reason was to prevent people using 3rd party apps.
I can still use Stealth for Reddit
Basically, each of these sites used open standards and APIs as a way to grow their service. Eventually once they got to the user base they wanted and beat out the competition, they could tighten the screws, lock things down, since the users didn’t have any place to go, they were locked in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
In terms of specifics, it’s unclear if they were ever profitable before locking things down, since the main goal at that phase wasn’t making money, it was growing active users and killing competitors. I would have to imagine that with the locked down APIs, they are more profitable, and they never really cared about the community and good will, only when it was beneficial to grow their user base.
Wouldn’t count that as EEE
It was not about getting paid for API usage, though they let the door open so they could sell that service for very specific purposes but not for alternative apps.
Their point, and it was admitted during the leaked conversation with one of the independent app developers, was about opportunity cost. Their official apps offer ways to get more money out of users, more advertisement, in app payments and all that. That’s the reason why the phone browser experience has also been killed.
Seems to work fine for those you listed. They wanted people to use their services directly and that’s what they get. It was never about making money off the api, it was about limiting api usage
Friend, Google is now paying for the privilege of accessing the reddit results and so far no other search engine is able to. I’m pretty sure reddit is making bank…
Twitter on the other hand, I doubt it. Some media companies might have accepted to pay for access, but most certainly didn’t. They most certainly lost money with the user exodus.
Craigslist didn’t do too well when they did something like this. it basically killed the site
At least with Reddit, banning 3rd party apps was just a byproduct. The overall point of paywalling their API was to prevent LLM AIs from training their models on Reddit user content without paying Reddit to do so.
