Shu also tells me that RIF was paying a “sizable revenue share” to Reddit beginning in 2012, which was during Yishan Wong’s tenure as CEO. Shu says he says initiated the talks with Reddit to create the agreement, which allowed for the licensed use of Reddit’s trademarks. (At the time, the app was called “reddit is fun.”) Shu says Reddit terminated the agreement in 2016 — which was the year after Huffman took over as CEO.
Holy shit the lede was a little buried from the title.
RIF had a revenue-sharing agreement with Reddit starting in 2012, and they had a working model to ensure that Reddit was compensated - and profited from - the API usage. RIF voluntarily worked out a deal to share it’s revenues back to Reddit. That deal was terminated after Spez took over as CEO, under his watch, and that cancellation is big enough that it absolutely would have gone via the CEO for approval. Spez decided to turn down the revenue share agreement with RIF, only to come back seven years later and complain like Reddit was somehow being taken advantage of due to the costs of app API usage.
What an absolutely meaty disclosure: the same problem Spez is complaining about now is a problem he personally caused shortly after rejoining Reddit.
OOOOHHH… I remember the name change. (I use/d RIF for the extent of my Reddit tenure) didn’t realize it was a revenue share. I thought (or gathered) that Reddit wanted the “Reddit” app to be the only one named that on the Play Store…
That was basically the motivation at the time. Sync was also affected, which used to offer the app under the label “Reddit Sync” (its original selling point was that you could download a large cache of Reddit to the app for offline viewing and “sync” it up later) and is why the subreddit is still called /r/redditsync.
It used to have a Snoo icon, too, and had to replace it with the (in my opinion much more clever) up and downvote arrows that form an S shape.
Holy shit the lede was a little buried from the title.
RIF had a revenue-sharing agreement with Reddit starting in 2012, and they had a working model to ensure that Reddit was compensated - and profited from - the API usage. RIF voluntarily worked out a deal to share it’s revenues back to Reddit. That deal was terminated after Spez took over as CEO, under his watch, and that cancellation is big enough that it absolutely would have gone via the CEO for approval. Spez decided to turn down the revenue share agreement with RIF, only to come back seven years later and complain like Reddit was somehow being taken advantage of due to the costs of app API usage.
What an absolutely meaty disclosure: the same problem Spez is complaining about now is a problem he personally caused shortly after rejoining Reddit.
OOOOHHH… I remember the name change. (I use/d RIF for the extent of my Reddit tenure) didn’t realize it was a revenue share. I thought (or gathered) that Reddit wanted the “Reddit” app to be the only one named that on the Play Store…
That was basically the motivation at the time. Sync was also affected, which used to offer the app under the label “Reddit Sync” (its original selling point was that you could download a large cache of Reddit to the app for offline viewing and “sync” it up later) and is why the subreddit is still called /r/redditsync.
It used to have a Snoo icon, too, and had to replace it with the (in my opinion much more clever) up and downvote arrows that form an S shape.
Spez: “we don’t need their money!”
Also spez: “why aren’t we making any money‽”