On Monday we wrote about the changes that Reddit was making to their API pricing, causing some services to shut down, and leading thousands of subreddits to choose to blackout (some temporarily, so…
I though this was a really solid take by Masnick, in particular:
As numerous people are pointing out, Reddit is discovering the same thing that Twitter is also discovering: when you build a service where the value is all the free content that users provide, you’re going to run into some problems when you suddenly start acting like you “own” all that, and you feel the need to put up paywalls for access.
A site like Reddit is as heavy on user-generated content as you can get. Compared to something like Youtube where there’s plenty of incentive for corporate posts. The effective use of Reddit by advertisers is just social listening and customer engagement. Not a space where you’re going to get a lot of bang for the buck.