Riding on the 'east wind' of charging AI manufacturers, Reddit eliminates third-party clients

Today, ChatGPT seems to have ushered in the second spring of the entire artificial intelligence industry. With the influx of a large number of participants, the "Ten Thousand Model War" is about to break out. The irresistible appeal of AIGC as a lucrative venture has led nearly every enterprise associated with it to want a piece of the pie. Rewrite: The profits from the AIGC pie are so attractive that almost all companies related to it want a piece of it. In early April, the "American Tieba" Reddit announced that it would start charging third-party developers for using its API. This move is to limit Reddit's data from being used by third parties to train artificial intelligence tools.

In fact, the intelligence displayed by large language models such as ChatGPT today relies on large-scale corpora for training. Since corpus resources are the basis for the birth of large models, they are naturally valuable. Therefore, it is natural for Internet vendors such as Reddit who own corpus resources to monetize them.

However, Reddit’s plan to make money by becoming popular on this track has an “accidental injury”. A few days ago, Christian Selig, a third-party client developer for Reddit, posted on social platforms that the third-party client Apollo he developed may be unsustainable because of Reddit's API charges.

According to the reply obtained by Christian Selig from Reddit, the new API policy requires a third party to pay $12,000 for crawling 50 million content. But the problem is that Apollo is a third-party client. The purpose of grabbing content is not to use Reddit content to train AI, but to present it to users. But even so, payment needs to be made according to the standards of AI manufacturers. As one of Reddit's most well-known third-party clients, Apollo generates 7 billion requests per month. If the new charging standards are followed, it means that Apollo needs to pay Reddit approximately US$20 million per year.

Although participants such as OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon are not short of money and have sufficient motivation to purchase data from Reddit to train their own large models, developers of third-party clients Often it is either a single person or a small or medium-sized team, basically "generating power for love." Therefore, it is obviously unreasonable for Reddit to put AI manufacturers and third-party client developers in the same ecological niche. After all, can Reddit not know that third-party client developers have no money?

So why does Reddit choose to treat them "equally" even though it knows that charging such fees will accidentally hurt independent developers like Christian Selig? Perhaps Reddit is planning to take this opportunity to use high fees to discourage third-party clients from quitting.

Nowadays, third-party clients, a product that emerged during the transition period from PC Internet to mobile Internet, seem to be increasingly disliked by Internet manufacturers. In addition to Reddit, Weibo in the domestic market and Twitter overseas have also explicitly or implicitly removed third-party clients that are dependent on their products.

In addition to the official APP, developers create third-party clients. As a representative of the open platform concept, it was also a trend in the Internet industry ten years ago. At that time, it was the beginning of the second decade of this century. The Internet industry had also developed for more than ten years. Everyone had realized that this was an emerging hot spot and a place of benefit. As market competition continued to intensify, it was left to The "development time" of a product is also getting shorter and shorter.

So there is a question before Internet manufacturers, that is, users' needs are obviously endless. Should they fulfill all needs themselves, or should other products seize their market share?

In fact, the open platform strategy is a typical product of the Internet dividend period. The characteristic of this period is that the entire Internet industry is full of gold. "Time is money, efficiency is life" is also a common view among Internet practitioners at that time. Under the guidance of this thinking, people often choose to take the core functions of the product into their own hands, share some of their limited user resources with third-party developers, and hope that they can satisfy more users in their respective vertical fields. in-depth needs.

Since Internet manufacturers generally chose "everyone adds firewood to the flames" at that time, the open platform soon became the standard configuration of major Internet manufacturers, and was extended based on the Internet manufacturers' own business and controlled by them. The ability is abstracted from the business to quickly realize service delivery and empower third-party developers. Weibo, Twitter, and even third-party clients of Reddit all appeared in this context. Officials open relevant resources to third parties by opening APIs or providing SDKs.

Unfortunately, when Weibo, Twitter, and Reddit grew from weak to powerful, things changed, because they found that they now did not need third-party developers and were able to satisfy users with their own strength. need. In turn, clients created by third-party developers may hinder the development of their own advertising businesses. Ultimately, as the market environment changes, the value of third-party developers in the eyes of platforms such as Reddit has also dropped sharply.

For example, in the early days of Reddit, expanding the number of users was undoubtedly the top priority. If the official APP was the main force, then the third-party client made by the developers was the auxiliary, and both parties complemented each other. But by 2023, going public will be Reddit's top priority, and whether the IPO can go smoothly will depend on the business model or profitability. At this time, third-party clients will in turn become an obstacle. Whether it is Weibo, Twitter or Reddit’s third-party client, their common selling point is advertising.

This is very "terrible". After all, the existence of third-party clients means that although some users belong to Reddit in name, these users cannot see ads and cannot complete monetization. At the same time, prohibiting the use of third-party clients will also bring the benefit of Reddit having complete control over user data.

There is no doubt that data is a valuable asset. In the past, Reddit’s API was provided to developers for free, which meant that it essentially shared the user database with developers for free. This is actually a problem to a certain extent. A waste of resources. And by taking advantage of the opportunity to charge data usage fees to AI manufacturers, Reddit took the opportunity to "kill" third-party clients and gather users who are outside the official APP, which can be said to be a plan to kill two birds with one stone.

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