7000 Subreddits go dark and nobody notices

By the time you are reading this, last week's effort of subreddits (imagine shareable links that can be commented on by many within a Reddit community) going private where only the Mods can see content and its subscribers can neither see nor access the subreddit). 

Reddit changed its API usage policy so that it now charges $0.24 per 1,000 API calls; whereas for the past x-number of years API usage was free to developers. Most for-profit companies will charge for API calls; sometimes this is baked into the service contract for enterprise platform licensing and sometimes API usage is charged at the per user per month/year/time period rate. It is not unusual to see online platforms doing this. Even Google charges for its Maps API.

Apollo is a freemium app; meaning that sure, there are features of the free version of it. But, to get access to other features, Apollo Pro costs a flat fee of $4.99 and Apollo Ultra has a subscription cost of $1.49/month or $12.99/year. The app's paid features allow users to manage multiple accounts (Reddit's app only allows one user account per current login session). Apollo has 1.3 million to 1.5 million monthly active users, and of that 900,000 daily active users. Each Apollo user consumes about 10,000 API calls per month to Reddit servers. The Apollo app makes about 50 million API calls per month.

App developers like to point out that Imgur's API pricing is much lower; but they fail to also disclose that Imgur is a free image hosting app. Imgur isn't charging customers to use their services for image sharing because the site is ad supported. 

Here's a thought. Why should Reddit shoulder the maintenance and server costs for all the API calls made by 3rd party vendors?

This Summer's Podcast List

Podcasts are almost like listening to 30 minute to an hour segments of an audiobook, except narrated with unscripted speakers; usually. You'd be surprised how much of what you might think of as an ordinary podcast done by an individual or a couple aren't scripted but they are. The average solo shop Youtube content creator will say that it takes roughly 20 hours of video and sound editing time for every one hour of finished content. Ads pays podcasters roughly $10/thousand listens for short ads, up to $25/thousand listens for longer ads. Let's say that you're Ira Glass of This American Life with 2 million listens per weekly episode.

2 million / 1000 = 2000 x ($10 or $25) = $20,000 to $50,000 potential ad revenue per episode

Influencer Marketing website has an interesting calculator of how profitable podcasts are. This year (2023), podcasts will exceed $2 billion in ad revenue.

But after deducting all the production costs, it still makes more sense for Podcasts to feature many ads. New podcasts are likely to have no ads or start with a couple really short ads at the beginning of the podcast. More established podcasts seem to have ads at the beginning, middle, and end of the podcast. But, how many ads should you serve up to listeners and is it more about greed than content? If you serve up so many ads that you lose listeners. Even though the Apple podcast app has a feature that lets you skip ahead (or "rewind" a few seconds), some podcasts have 4-6 minutes of ads.

When you think of the spoken word, it's roughly 1 page of scripted content per minute or 500 words per page. If you have unique and original podcast content that's 10 minutes long (of just content, no ads), that's 10 pages of words that a human needs to write for the podcast. There is just something about human-written content that is more impactful, meaningful, or entertaining.