Reddit CEO Steve Huffman’s decision to charge developers for API access was inspired at least in part by Twitter owner Elon Musk’s decision to do the same.
Mr. Huffman seemed to confirm the connection in an interview with NBC last week.
“Long story short, my takeaway from Twitter and Elon at Twitter is reaffirming that we can build a really good business in this space at our scale,” he said. “Now, they’ve taken the dramatic road, and I guess I can’t sit here and say that we’re not either, but I think there’s a lot of opportunity here.”
Mr. Musk announced in February he would be charging developers for application programming interface as a way for the company to make back some of the money lost from fleeing advertisers.
Mr. Huffman’s comments underscore an effort to make more money ahead of an initial public offering this year. Many industry experts see this month’s layoffs and the decision to start charging developers for API as a way to generate revenue.
Reddit announced in April it would charge developers 24 cents per 1,000 API requests. The policy change sparked a protest that saw thousands of popular subreddits go dark last week. The protest was supposed to last two days but has continued, with over 3,500 subreddits still offline.
Developers have used Reddit API for years to develop sister apps for creativity or accessibility. Popular developer Apollo said the price change would cost it $20 million a year and announced it would shut down at the end of June.
Mr. Huffman has not backed down and has openly criticized the protestors. In a lengthy interview with The Verge, he said Reddit’s decision was all about business, adding that he sees many of the larger developers as direct competitors that should pay for data.
“You go to the App Store, you type in Reddit, you get two options, right? There’s Apollo. You go to one, it’s my business, and you look at our ads, use our products,” Mr. Huffman said. “That’s 95% of our iOS users. The rest go to Apollo, which uses our logo, or something like it, takes our data — for free — and resells it to users making a 100% margin. And instead of using our app, they use that app. Is that not competitive?”
On Friday, hackers joined the API battle on the side of the protesting moderators. The ransomware group BlackCat announced it would release over 80 gigabytes of stolen employee data if the company did not reverse its API decision.
