[munificent]

An interesting side effect of making your product ad-driven is what it does to the incentive structure of treating your product as a platform.

Twitter is just one example of many of companies who have created an API, asked developers to build on it, and then later burned the whole thing down.

Fundamentally, if you let developers build products that access your data in ways that users want, the very first they're going to do is remove the fucking ads. And, obviously, if that's how your company makes money, you can't let that happen. Given the choice between killing your ads or killing your API, you're going to kill the API every time.

Imagine running a casino and offering a "slot machine API". If you let the developers discard all of the losing spins, you're gonna have a bad time. This is essentially what an ad-driven company does when they have an API that lets developers separate the data users want (actual data) from the data they don't (ads).

[nabbe]

Unless this is the idea. Never have worked with it before but my understanding (confirmed by many of the comments here) is that the current API is pretty difficult to work with. Rate limit the new API and allow less restrictive access through paid tiers.

Suddenly Twitter is no longer reliant solely on ad revenue and all of the stigmas associated with it in the current changing environment.

With this, they are no longer an ad company but a platform ala Google Maps/Stripe. Plenty of companies would be more than willing to pay for unrestricted access to Twitter for data analysis.

Ad revenue may take a hit but won’t disappear overnight