Apollo was already a nice app so why didn’t reddit just buy apollo and integrate ads into it and just keep the features that made everyone happy.

  • pinwurm@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    2 years ago

    It would’ve made the users happy, but ultimately Apollo is not profitable for Reddit. It would need to be retooled and redesigned to extract data and push advertisers. as a free version…

    Of course, Reddit could sell it as a “$2/mo Premium Reddit Experience” app that keeps what it is. And I’m sure there’s a ton of folks that’ll pay the benefit of that, particularly mods and power users.

    Apollo’s paid subscriber base is 50K. Assuming they maintain that, it’s $1.2M/year revenue. The question is… is that worth it to a billion dollar company? To maintain and support all that?

    My gut would say ‘yes’. Although goodwill is unquantifiable, keeping the community of volunteers placated is an investment in Reddit’s longterm health. Same reason the Mafia bought turkeys for uninvolved neighborhood families on Thanksgiving - so they’d look the other way when shady happenings go down.

    But Reddit doesn’t want to spend money on turkeys. So we’ll see how well that works out for them. I’m not optimistic.

      • pinwurm@lemmy.mlEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        At some point, the apps here will be as good or better than Apollo. Give it time.

        Just a few things to keep an eye out for:

        memmy is in very, very, very early Beta and incorporates Apollo’s gestures and scroll style. It’s missing pretty much every feature. However - scrolling, voting and commenting is a breeze and there’s a lot of potential.

        mlem is also in very early beta and has several developers working on it. My understanding is there’s a goal for a 6/30 App Store release to coincide with the 3rd Party Kill date for Reddit.

        The famed RIF Developer is working on a Tildes app that federates with Lemmy. It will be available on iOS and Android.