Social discussion forum Reddit has announced that it’ll begin charging for use of its API (Application Programming Interface).
Reddit’s API will continue to be available for free to developers who want to create apps and bots that help people utilize Reddit, as well as researchers who want to study Reddit for solely academic or noncommercial purposes, reports TechCrunch.
The New York Times first reported the news.
According to Reddit’s co-founder and CEO, Steve Huffman, companies that extract data from Reddit without providing any benefits to its users will now be required to pay a fee, the report mentioned.
“It’s a good time for us to tighten things up. We think that’s fair,” Huffman was quoted as saying.
According to the report, Reddit is seeking avenues to monetize its extensive collection of user-generated content.
This move comes at a time when the platform’s content has been in high demand for training prominent text-generating machine learning models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4.
Reddit has around 430 million monthly active users in more than 1.2 million special interest communities, of which 138,000 are active as of 2019, the report said.
