According to [1], Reddit has 52 million daily active users (and 430 monthly users), while according to [2] the Reddit app has 17 million daily active users. Both numbers are from 2021. So only about a third of DAUs would be using the Reddit app. Apollo has 50,000 yearly subscribers, so is probably more on the negligible side.

[1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/reddit-statistics/

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1255714/reddit-app-dau-w...

> Apollo has 50,000 yearly subscribers, so is probably more on the negligible side overall.

Note this figure does not include free users, nor the users of the plethora of other clients... But regardless

Clearly, Reddit has deemed 3rd party clients pose a huge cost to their platform, otherwise they wouldn't charge through the roof. IMO, all these numbers are meaningless given this fact.

I’m not sure what Reddit’s rationale is here. Third-party app users are less than 1% (can’t find the link where I read this). The most plausible explanation is that they want to get rid of a potential future threat, because I don’t believe that current third-party usage constitutes any substantial loss. Otherwise buying out Apollo as mentioned in TFA should have been an easy decision.

Maybe I am a little naive here but…

Wouldn’t an ad support guideline be enough for third party apps to continue coexisting with the official Reddit app?

Call it that, or sdk. But if ad based revenue is so important for Reddit, getting Apollo and the rest to properly display and track ads is imho a no brainer and would totally solve the issue at hand.

As I said maybe I am too naive, and I only see part of the picture.

You assume they act rationally. As mentioned in the post, the API costs are orders of magnitude more than the expected value from an average user.

In the post further down they discuss that. Reddit’s rationale is opportunity cost per user, not the price of serving the api.

We’ve got lots of web devs and startup space folks on this site, I guess somebody must know how to look this sort of thing up?

I googled “percentage of reddit mobile traffic in app” but got a bunch of marketing sites, and wasn’t able to sort out which ones were bullshit. I bet there’s a good source for this sort of thing though.

In any case, we don’t need to wager right? It seems like this ought to be measurable.