Reddit Sees Decrease in Engagement and Active Users Amid Protests
In June, an unprecedented conflict unfolded between a social media platform and its users over policy decisions. Reddit made headlines when it unveiled a new pricing change for its API, aimed at preventing AI platforms from utilizing the website’s data for training purposes. Unfortunately, this move had an unintended consequence for third-party apps, which were suddenly burdened with exorbitant fees to access Reddit’s data. This sparked a major disagreement between the platform’s administrators and the community, leading to protests and a significant decline in website traffic and active users for Reddit.
It all started when Apollo, a third-party Reddit platform for iOS, made a post announcing that it will shut down on June 30 because it has to pay around $20 million in API requests per year, which is a significantly higher amount. than the total revenue generated by the application. The news shocked the community, and when several third-party apps such as Rif is Fun and Naharwal announced they were closing their stores, many subreddit Moderators decided to go “dark” by making the subreddits private.
The demonstration was scheduled to last for 48 hours starting on June 12. As soon as the protest started, Reddit suffered a moment of massive outage. That was the first crash, which dropped its daily traffic by 7 percent and the time people spent on the platform by 16 percent, Samanweb data shared by TechCrunch showed. The drop continued throughout June 12 and 13, which was the time of the demonstration. But this was just the beginning.
Reddit is suffering a hit to its website traffic
The report highlighted that the time spent on the website dropped from 8 minutes 40 seconds to 7 minutes 16 seconds during the 2-day protest. The total amount of online traffic also decreased from the usual 56 million to 52 million.
While some of the main subreddits have since returned to normal, many continue to protest indefinitely. Some of the returning subreddits planned a further protest by allowing NSFW (Not safe for work) content on the subreddit. NSFW content is sexual, violent or otherwise sensitive content intended only for people over a certain age.
The reason for allowing the NSFW tag was because Reddit does not serve ads on these subreddits due to the connotation associated with the type of content. As a result, between June 13 and June 23, average daily visits to Reddit’s advertising portal dropped by 20 percent (from 16,009 to 12,874), according to a TechCrunch report.
Reddit retaliated by suspending the moderators who implemented the tag, though they were soon reinstated, presumably when the Moderators agreed to turn off the NSFW tag.
Now, with Reddit rolling out the new API changes on July 1st, it’s just one day away and things are still moving. Moderators and community members are preparing for the possible shutdown of third-party apps, and it is possible that the community will organize more protests.
