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Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

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Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#131

Post by VWWHFSfQ »

flutas wrote: post #59
paxys wrote: post #21

The part about him already selling 50K annual subscriptions to Apollo is the interesting one in the piece, and explains the decision to discontinue the app. He entered into a contract with users assuming that his API costs would be 0. He can't change that contract and start charging another fee on top, and is obligated to continue to provide the service no matter what Reddit now decides to charge him. So the solution…

> So the solution is easy for any laywer to provide - just shut down the business. I don't really agree with that take. He's already talked about what happens now, and it includes refunds for unused subscription time. > I've been talking to my rep at Apple, and over the next few weeks my plan is to release something similar to what Tweetbot did (Paul has been incredibly helpful in all of this) where folks can decide…

I'm astounded that he was actually able to run a business pulling in $500,000 a year in subscriptions without ever having to pay the actual platform the users are "subscribing" to a dime. And he's been doing this for what? 8 years? No wonder he doesn't care about shutting it down. It was a free lunch the whole time.

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#132

Post by tantalor »

runnr_az wrote: post #113

Why doesn't he get his users to get their own API keys?

It's too much of a hassle for ordinary users, and probably requires to set up billing.

Reddit could easily change their terms in the future to prohibit.

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#134

Post by paxys »

jyxent wrote: post #117
paxys wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would charge devs over 20x what a user actually cost/were worth Are you implying that a user is worth $0.125/mo to Reddit? Because that is laughably inaccurate. Mature platforms like Facebook extract up to $60 per user per quarter in advertising revenue from developed countries. Reddit itself made an estimated $500M+ from ads last year. ~$2.50/mo is already more than fair. Thinking that Reddit owes full data acc…

Reddit reported that they had 430 million monthly active users in 2019. $500 million per year / 430 million users = $1.16 per user per year $1.16 / 12 months = $0.10 per user per month.

Pretty big difference between users who open the site once a month to look at a meme someone sent them vs those who are online for multiple hours a day. The ones who use third party apps are more likely to be in the latter bucket, and the loss of revenue from them will be significant more than the bottom tier of users.

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#135

Post by JumpCrisscross »

sgift wrote: post #130
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> without those moderators there's not much of a site How many of those users would notice if Reddit swapped in paid moderators for the largest subs?

Reddit had years to make changes to the moderating situation. Any changes at all. Do you really think that they will start now instead of just cutting off their army of free mods and then wonder why things will go to shit even faster?

> Do you really think that they will start now instead of just cutting off their army of free mods

Better now than during a roadshow.

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#136

Post by flutas »

Sakos wrote: post #111
flutas wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So the solution is easy for any laywer to provide - just shut down the business. I don't really agree with that take. He's already talked about what happens now, and it includes refunds for unused subscription time. > I've been talking to my rep at Apple, and over the next few weeks my plan is to release something similar to what Tweetbot did (Paul has been incredibly helpful in all of this) where folks can decide…

Based on what he said, it's clear that trying to run Apollo while servicing these users would cost him hundreds of thousands more than that with no guarantee that he'd be able to make up the difference over time. So he is just shutting down the business. Even if he's legally obligated to refund the users it's still cheaper than what it would cost in API fees.

Agree, but the parent comment was coming across as it's a "cut and run" situation.

For anyone curious about what he said on trying to run everything as a paid sub quickly:

> One option many have suggested is to simply increase the price of Apollo to offset costs. The issue here is that Apollo has approximately 50,000 yearly subscribers at the moment. On average they paid $10/year many months ago, a price I chose based on operating costs I had at the time (server fees, icon design, having a part-time server engineer). Those users are owed service as they already prepaid for a year, but starting July 1st will (in the best case scenario) cost an additional $1/month each in Reddit fees. That's $50,000 in sudden monthly fee that will start incurring in 30 days.

> So you see, even if I increase the price for new subscribers, I still have those many users to contend with. If I wait until their subscription expires, slowly month after month there will be less of them. First month $50,000, second month maybe $45,000, then $40,000, etc. until everything has expired, amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars. It would be cheaper to simply refund users.

> I hope you can recognize how that's an enormous amount of money to suddenly start incurring with 30 days notice. Even if I added 12,000 new subscribers at $5/month (an enormous feat given the short notice), after Apple's fees that would just be enough to break even.

> Going from a free API for 8 years to suddenly incurring massive costs is not something I can feasibly make work with only 30 days. That's a lot of users to migrate, plans to create, things to test, and to get through app review, and it's just not economically feasible. It's much cheaper for me to simply shut down.

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#137

Post by leokennis »

kats wrote: post #80
nocoiner wrote: post #4

IMO, he’s doing a pretty good job negotiating this as well. I know there’s a lot of words right now about broken promises and everyone not wanting to do business with anyone else, but from the outside to this uninformed observer it looks to me like this is a high stakes showdown that’s inching toward a commercial resolution. There’s some dollar amount (representing either an exchange of value or avoided losses) where…

It's clear he is blackmailing them and the upset users are his leverage. After posting that "Apollo will close down on June 30th." he now says " Same as always : I love building Apollo, and if Reddit is willing to to talk I'm happy to as well." which of course was not what he always said. He was never joking about asking for 10 million dollars and is still hoping for an offer.

It seems you don’t really see the power dynamics here. Reddit holds all the power: they have the API, they can shut anyone out of it, they can ask for it whatever they want, they could even re-open all closed subreddits and install new mods.

All the community and Apollo has is the power to say “Reddit, if you don’t play nice, we’ll walk away”.

To call that a blackmail requires some mental gymnastics.

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#138

Post by spdif899 »

nemo44x wrote: post #88

If Apollo is so popular, why doesn't Reddit clone the best features for their app? I'm guessing the Apollo founder here is trying to get bought out at this point, which is pretty smart.

We saw this before with Alien Blue, which was previously the top iOS app. Reddit bought it, promised to turn it into their official app, killed it, and released a version with fewer features and more bugs.

If Reddit buys Apollo, there's zero chance they let it operate independently. Christian gets a nice payout and all his users leave for the next best option. If I'm reddit I don't think I see that as being worth the cost that the app's userbase might be on paper just based on API cost.

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#139

Post by ink_13 »

George83728 wrote: post #103
mynameisvlad wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering the amount of media attention this has gotten from even mainstream sources including places like the BBC, I’m going to go out on a limb and say the number is far higher than 99.99%. That doesn’t even count all the people that are visiting their favorite subreddits only to see them closed with a message detailing what’s happened.

> Considering the amount of media attention this has gotten from even mainstream sources including places like the BBC Reddit moderators are uniquely privileged when it comes to making their opinions heard on reddit. The shuttering of subreddits is sensational and splashy enough to get media attention, but in itself says little about how most reddit users feel. A moderator revolt is like a strike of middle managers,…

Some subs held polls, and in every one that I saw, the strike was quite broadly popular. I think characterizing this as a few power mods throwing their toys out of the pram is unfair.

Re: Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted

#140

Post by darknessmonk »

paxys wrote: post #86
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the question is how much money they apps can make from having users, not Reddit.

The apps can make whatever they charge. $2.50 is now the base cost to add to every subscription. If the users value the service they will pay. Developers already pay Apple & Google 30% for the privilege of being in the app stores. Is it too much for the very service that is powering your entire app to ask for their own cut?

> Developers already pay Apple & Google 30% for the privilege of being in the app stores. Is it too much for the very service that is powering your entire app to ask for their own cut?

Mind you that price is just part of the problem - the 30-day to start charging, was just as bad. It's absurd and completely made to kill the 3PS. Maybe if they have maintained the price but gave time for apps to discuss/adapt/replan, they could have found other options.

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