While CEO Steve Huffman may be dismissive of the thousands of subreddits going dark to protest his planned API changes, new Reddit usage metrics show that the protests had a definite effect.
Analytics data shows that daily visits dropped steadily as the protest unfolded, and average session length fell to the lowest level in three years …
Background
The sorry saga kicked off three weeks ago, when it was revealed that Reddit would be demanding $20M a year for access to the API used by popular third-party app Apollo. The developer revealed that the app would have to close as a result. A planned protest by what was initially a few dozen of the biggest subreddits eventually turned into more than 8,000 subreddits going dark for at least 48 hours.
Things got so bad that Huffman had to warn employees not to wear the Reddit logo in public, all the while making it clear that he didn’t give a– er, wasn’t interested in the views of Reddit users. He then doubled down by threatening to replace moderators. Even the bad guys were on the side of users.
Reddit usage metrics fall
Engadget reports that things continue to go well for Huffman.
On the day before the blackout began on June 12th, Similarweb logged more than 57 million daily visits to Reddit across desktop and mobile web clients. By the end of the first day of the protest, daily visits were below 55 million. Then, at the end of June 13th, Similarweb recorded fewer than 53 million daily visits to Reddit. Compared to the website’s average daily volume over the past month, the 52,121,649 visits Reddit saw on June 13th represented a 6.6 percent drop.
Over that same time period, Similarweb recorded a more dramatic decrease in the amount of time Reddit users were spending on the platform. The day before the protest began, an average session on the website was about eight minutes and 31 seconds long. A day later, that metric fell to seven minutes and 17 seconds, or the lowest that stat has been in the past three years.
9to5Mac’s Take
My colleague Chance gave the best summary I’ve seen of events to date.
It truly seems like Huffman woke up on a random Tuesday after a bad night’s sleep and decided on a whim to go nuclear and destroy the businesses of these third-party app developers. And every day since then, he’s woken up and dug his heels in, silenced user feedback, and stuck to his guns.
Huffman would no doubt argue that the hit to usage metrics is temporary, and nothing to worry about. But as more than one arrogant CEO has discovered, when you kick your users in the teeth, the effects can be rather longer-lasting than you might have hoped. Huffman has not only done this, but done the same to moderators and third-party app developers, both of whom have played a significant role in driving Reddit’s popularity.
Anyone who had been planning on investing in the upcoming IPO is likely now thinking again.
Photo: John Middelkoop/Unsplash
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