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Reddit’s API changes and the new business model of social media

I’ve written a lot recently about the shift underway in the business model of social media. The sudden lurch to a subscription model has been provoked by a number of exogenous shocks (changing investment climate, digital ad market going into retrenchment and Apple torching part of the infrastructural basis for surveillance capitalism) but it also feels like the old model was never going to be the sustained offer to consumers.

If this is the consumer-facing shift, events at Reddit currently illustrate a comparable business-facing shift with sudden increases in fees for API access, much like at Twitter. The API has been essential to building a commercial ecology around platforms (third party clients, leveraging social data, integration services like Zapier etc) but the dependencies inherent in that relation are now facilitating a kind of extortion. Platforms are trying to monetise the assets which previously they treated in a quasi-open fashion.

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