Reddit is redirecting some impressions away from existing communities, and some advertisers are pausing campaigns.
I suspect a lot of subs will come back online just so they can publicly coordinate and announce their permanent shutdowns or migrations to somewhere else. If Reddit doesn’t relent by June 30 (or maybe even if they do), I think we’ll see a lot of communities permanently go dark.
This article has some strange framing to me.
Currently, these protests are impacting a small percentage of Reddit’s more than 100,000 active communities.
This completely ignores that the 8000+ subreddits that went dark account for a VAST majority of content and traffic on the site.
The article also completely whitewashes the conflict with “Moderators are protesting a new Reddit policy, starting July 1, charging third-party apps to use its API. Some of these apps, which help moderators manage and grow their communities, have said they will have to shut down because these charges make running their businesses prohibitively expensive.”
How dare those freeloading third-party app businesses think they are entitled to Reddit providing an API for free? /s
I said this elsewhere, but almost all of the articles (Verge excepted) miss the larger points. Someone coming in cold with no sense of the context here could easily walk away with the idea that Reddit is behaving reasonably (e.g., why shouldn’t they charge for API usage? they’re a company trying to make money!) and users and mods are completely out of control. These articles rarely address the concerning accessibility issues being created by the API changes. They rarely address the price to be charged is vastly larger than the price that it costs to provide API access/recoup losses from inability to advertise to 3P users. They don’t address the fact that the changes were announced with barely any lead time to allow 3P apps to make necessary changes on their end to avoid insane fees. They don’t cover the damage to mod tools or the fact that the moderators are working for free and occasionally working at a loss (due to purchasing their own servers, for example). They also don’t address the fact that Steve Huffman pointedly lied about Christian Selig threatening to blackmail Reddit, that he doubled down on this in his AMA, and that if you sift through his c&p statements, he doesn’t actually answer questions or provide any kind of information or reassurance. It’s all very annoying.
inability to advertise to 3P users
And this isn’t even strictly true. Reddit could have given 3P apps the option to pay a reasonable price for the API, or they had to serve Reddit’s ads to avoid paying the fee, it would be a fair compromise.
It sounds to me like Reddit can’t profit from ads, even if the 3P apps served them. If that’s true, Reddit is doomed, and investors will see that as they approach the IPO.
Campaigns have notched slightly lower impression delivery and consequently, slightly higher CPMs, over the days of the blackout, Johnson said. If the performance weakness continues for a week or two, the agency would start recommending decreasing spend with Reddit or directing it to other platforms. The moderator blackout is supposed to end Wednesday.
Damn. Too bad the mods settled on a two-day blackout. Shoulda gone for a week to start…
Dabaghi notes this pause will be shorter than more prolonged advertiser boycotts on Twitter and Meta. Still, Reddit has been working on its relationships with advertisers, and any accumulated goodwill could be diminished if the precarious situation continues.
Let’s hope the mods of the larger subs stay the course
