> That number was corroborated by Reddit themselves

Ok, and it says other apps do 2.5x times less than that.

> There is no reason to assume malice on the side of Apollo.

There are very strong reasons: guy is trying to protect his business, he uses discounted imgur numbers as basis and doesn't mention standard plan numbers, so he is working hard to distort facts.

> Regardless, $2/user is still a ridiculous ask for a social media site

Its hyper active user given 345 daily requests, not just your regular user with few monthly visits.

For example 345 reqs * 1% CTR * 10c per click will give you $10 of monthly Ads revenue if you put one Ad on each page.

> Ok, and it says other apps do 2.5x times less than that.

They also have less than 2.5 the number of users. Counting the total is a very silly way to pretend the usage is high...

> There are very strong reasons: guy is trying to protect his business, he uses discounted imgur numbers as basis and doesn't mention standard plan numbers, so he is working hard to distort facts.

Those are not strong reasons. He uses the current best availeble data he has, which is comparable API plans he is working with.

He is very, very generous when calculating Reddit revenue. When they published their 100 million revenue quarter Fidelity valued their investment in reddit at 100million, they now value it at 60 which is a 40% drop since then.

Despite this, Christian considers their quarterly revenue 2x what it was at their peak, and adds 150 million on top to round the number to 600 mill annual. Most industry estimates do not go past 350. He borderline doubled their revenue for his napkin calculations.

So no, there are no strong reasons to believe he was lying about his math when he goes out of his way to be unexplainably kind to reddits revenue numbers.

> Its hyper active user given 345 daily requests, not just your regular user with few monthly visits.

Depending on how the api is set up you can have. 1 request for the front page, 1 request for the post itself, 1 request for the top 100 comments. scroll a bit, anoher request for the next 100 comments.

That is 4 requests for 1 user by checking one post and seeing a bit of what the conversation is. 34 requests a day is about 10 posts and some frontpage/sub scrolling. That is pretty light use for someone who uses Reddit daily, and its basically patheitc use for Mods who have to put in hundreds of monthly free hours at keeping communities civil.

> For example 345 reqs * 1% CTR * 10c

You have 0 chance of getting those rates on reddit, for a number of reasons.

One is that many reqs are on posts with no ads embbeded. two is that 1% ctr is high for reddit. and 3 is because reddit has awful conversion metrics and you are not getting 10c per click.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/reddit-users-are-the-least-v...

They have tried soo hard to increase ARPU and so far they havent cracked past 0.6$ when industry leaders fly past 7$ per user.

So reddit is losing fuck all from those 345 requests, and instead is gonna lose a huge hosts of mods, which will make the site more toxic, harder to advertise and crater their ARPU again making Fidelitys 40% loss since 2018 look like child's play.