Following on the heels of Twitter’s choice to restrict third-party entry to its information, Reddit in the present day announced that it’ll start charging to be used of its API.

It’s not a blanket coverage change. As reported by The New York Instances, Reddit’s API will stay free to builders who wish to construct apps and bots that assist folks use Reddit, in addition to to researchers who want to examine Reddit for strictly tutorial or noncommercial functions.

However firms that “crawl” Reddit for information and “don’t return any of that worth” to customers must pay up,” Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman advised The Instances.

“It’s a great time for us to tighten issues up,” Huffman stated. “We expect that’s truthful.”

The transfer comes as Reddit seems to be for methods to monetize its huge array of user-generated content material, which as The Instances notes has been more and more used to coach high-profile, text-generating machine studying fashions reminiscent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4. As of 2019, Reddit had over 430 million month-to-month energetic customers throughout greater than 1.2 million particular curiosity communities, 138,000 are active.

Huffman advised The Instances that he believes Reddit information is especially invaluable as a result of it’s constantly up to date.

“The Reddit corpus of information is admittedly invaluable,” he reiterated. “Greater than another place on the web, Reddit is a house for genuine dialog. There’s a number of stuff on the location that you simply’d solely ever say in remedy, or AA, or by no means in any respect … However we don’t want to present all of that worth to a number of the largest firms on this planet without spending a dime.”

Shareholders might be the motivator. Reddit hasn’t introduced the main points of its API pricing but. However the firm is making ready for a possible preliminary public providing someday later this yr, and traders shall be searching for development in — or completely new streams of — income.

Reddit, which was valued at round $10 billion in August 2021, is estimated to have made $350 million from advertisements two years in the past. That whole pales compared to Meta’s and even Twitter’s advert revenues. Meta made $113 billion in 2022, whereas Twitter, regardless of its many controversies, raked in practically $7 billion.

In information associated to the API coverage change, Reddit in the present day stated that it hopes to include extra AI into how the location operates, reminiscent of figuring out the usage of AI-generated textual content on Reddit and including a label that notifies customers {that a} remark may’ve come from a bot. Reddit additionally goals to enhance its moderation instruments and the third-party bots that assist moderators monitor the boards.