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Comment by ihuman | Hacker News Reader

> which is great as a user, but horrible for monetization

That's Reddit's fault, though. They don't include ads when a user uses the API.

Even if they did, it'd be trivial for a developer to exclude the ads, and why wouldn't they? Obviously Reddit could try and enforce that via ToS, but even then they'd have to track offenders down and threaten them with revocation.

Don't be so sure, a lot of Reddit content looks like product placement to me.

Cant they use an API Key to track down offenders?

...or meter their API requests until they comply.

I wonder how advertisers would feel about their ad showing up in arbitrary unofficial applications. I'd guess ads sent via API to be shown on unofficial apps would be less desirable than ads on the official app (which has known behaviors that reddit can document). Maybe the price would be lower or they'd only pay per click?

Do any other APIs include ads to be shown to the end user? It's an interesting idea!

You can control for that... "[ ] show ads on reddit third-party apps" and you can also allow advertisers to blacklist or whitelist third-party apps. You can even push a link through to a 5 second ad first if it's a video for example. There's plenty of ways to monetize.

At some point advertisers will need to accept they cannot have their cake and eat it too as we fly forward in technology progression.

Plus, most of these objections are based on moralism which is bogus and misused in the first place.

I could see companies putting ad data in an API and saying, "If this block shows up, you must show it in order to continue using this API for free; or pay." Seems fair to me.

I can't understand this view. Particularly when advertiser objects having their ad shown next to a questionable content. I can print something ugly and tape it next to my laptop screen and now all ads are showing next to something ugly. What's the difference if it is in an app?

A lot of top posts in the popular subs are ads anyway, and it's likely they are already monetizing those.

Like all social media / user generated platforms, paid promotion is constantly being passed as legitimate content in some shape or form - but there's not really any reason to believe that reddit capitalizes on that themselves.

To look at how reddit is monetizing their platform, it seems straight forward to look at their advertiser page, and see how they try to pitch their ad platform. Paid promotions - which have become somewhat of a first party feature on Youtube for example -aren't discussed.

If they did though, wouldn’t a third party client at least give the option to strip them out given their presence makes the app worse for most users?

Reddit could then revoke the API keys easily.

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