It's not strange at all. At least the Reddit CEO heard and understood perfectly well what the Apollo dev said in that call and there's a recording to prove that.

Your first sentence misrepresents what the Apollo dev said. Actually, it's the exact same misrepresentation that the Reddit CEO knowingly made in public.

First off, it's abundantly clear that the Apollo dev wasn't actually demanding money. It was a pointed statement that revealed the CEO wasn't being honest about the costs.

The CEO, in contradiction with publicly available data, claimed that Apollo was costing Reddit $20 million per year in lost opportunity. So the dev jokingly offered to sell Apollo for half that price. Then Reddit would be able to recoup the cost in half a year and gain an additional $20 million yearly. What a great deal, right? Except they both knew that the $20 million price tag was complete bogus.

My understanding is that Reddit is saying that by not charging for the API they are losing $20M per year. So he said, well you can buy me out, and instead of doing a multiple of that $20M to be like $100M, he’s only asking for half of only one year’s worth of what they would lose. Clearly they don’t want to do that deal because the $20M figure is complete bogus.

> if he can't find a way to pay it then Apollo shuts down and the majority of users return to the official Reddit site/app for free

I think you underestimate the fallout here.

If Reddit thinks Apollo can pay them 20 million a year, 10 million is certainly a nice deal for the app? I guess that is what he meant.

“ Is he even serious about any of this?”

Not sure how people are misunderstanding him, he literally said he was joking… He knows it’s not a great deal for Reddit. His whole point is that the app isn’t actually worth $20 million a year, which is what they want him to pay. It’s not even worth $10 million. Not to him or Reddit or anyone else.

So what he said rather poorly was:

1) ok so, according to you I’m costing you $20M/year in API load

2) How about you pay me $10M which is 6 months of your cost, and I turn off the $20M/year burden immediately.

3) you make your money back in 6 months and within a year are up $10M

The problem is Apollo does not cost Reddit $20M/year lol

Reddit should have ended the call politely and told the Apollo guy to reach out with some sort of negotiator/liaison/agent/manager on the line.

>There's no benefit to paying $10 million.

Him not rabble rousing their user base against them would have been the benefit.