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Users provide these platforms with data by just using it. It’s how we use their service.īinder: Exactly, exactly.

Here’s the thing, though: That data that they have is kind of us. Ryssdal: It makes some sense that Twitter and Reddit want to charge for access to their data. But the prices that Twitter and Reddit were subsequently asking for, it’s practically unheard of in the industry. And it’s not completely out of the ordinary to charge for API access. And according to Reddit’s CEO, Steve Huffman, they sort of looked at what Musk was doing over at Twitter and were sort of inspired by it, regardless of what everyone else seems to think of it.

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One of those things was to start charging for what was previously a free API access. Could you remind us what Reddit and Twitter have done? And then I want to get into the “why it’s a big deal” thing.īinder: Shortly after Elon Musk took over Twitter, he made some changes that put a price on various different features on the platform. And by charging, I mean a lot of money and prevented some access. Ryssdal: We are talking to you then because, most recently, Twitter, and then Reddit a number of weeks or months ago, in terms of their API they started charging for it. All these platforms have routinely provided API in some fashion. And you could do it the other way around to where you pull data from platforms to, you know, do searches or collect data. So say I want to create an app that makes it really easy for my customers to post on Facebook and Instagram and all these platforms at once. But, basically, they allow third-party developers to work directly with their platform. So API stands for application programming interface.

Kai Ryssdal: For those who are not well-versed, could you give the layman’s description of what APIs are, please? The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. He joined Marketplace’s Kai Ryssdal to talk about how it’s playing out and what kind of downstream effects we might see. Matt Binder, a senior tech reporter at Mashable, has written about the clash over social media APIs. In light of these money issues, Twitter and Reddit decided to try something new: They introduced new pricing schemes for third-party developers who use their platforms. As a point of comparison, Meta brought in $113 billion in ad sales last year, Twitter generated nearly $7 billion and Reddit banked just $350 million. Reddit, too, has been trying to figure out new ways to monetize. But he seems to be working on that problem. Elon Musk himself, Twitter’s new owner, recently said Twitter is “ negative cash flow” and that ad revenue has been cut in half since his acquisition.

It is no secret that Twitter HQ is having money problems.

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