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Comment by lokar | Hacker News Reader

They have to be much less than 1%, I don’t t see how the math works. Views (and ad clicks) are what matter, not posts and comments. They only need the posts and comments to have something to stick an ad next to.

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Open AI already showed that you can train an LLM on the stuff reddit's already got and produce a site with as much traffic as reddit gets... so what are the users needed for?

I say this in jest, but only partially... lots of subreddits have noticed influexes of AI bots recently. Maybe spammers testing the water, or maybe you were just the product that was just helping train its replacement.

But the api doesn't deliver ads and the clients don't pay Reddit.

But they don’t cost much. Getting the activity scaled ad rev from these users won’t make them profitable.

Cost is a red herring here - the real metric is opportunity cost. These are users who spend a lot of time on reddit and give up a ton of data, so they can almost certainly get a much better CPI from these users, and give them a ton of ads.

It is a gamble. I am a Reddit power user in part because of the superb unobtrusive experience of old.reddit and Apollo. If you shove it full of ads, it’s no longer the experience I got addicted to. At that point I’d rather leave.

In online games and newspaper paywalls you have on average 1-3 % valuable users. Even if Apollo made up less than 1%, those are probably the valuable ones so it could be a good chunk of those.

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