Not only adverts - animated adverts. They are serving data from a free API and looking to piggy back off it. Not only is my assessment not "poor", it is too kind to the developers.
I truly don't understand the narrative from the past few days.
These third parties lived by serving their own ads instead of reddit's. They paid $0 to reddit yet made a very good living themselves (at least for the top ones like apollo and sync).
And yet the narrative is now that they provided tremendous value to reddit by providing them with exposure (lol!) and that their users were creating most of reddit's content (which is most certainly false) and that reddit are monsters who duped them.
Let's be real here. Those developers had a good run, they made a living of of reddit's content for a decade. Bravo. That was nice. But they all knew it was going to end one day ("Is it fair for Apollo to not pay reddit?" was a common question on the apollo sub, so even the USERS knew it wasn't a fully bidirectional relationship).
The problem isn't that they're expecting third party clients to pay for API usage.
The problem is that their prices are completely outlandish and multiple orders of magnitude more than they would've made of the same users had they used the official app.
On top of that, the transition period for third party apps to somehow implement a way to make these ridiculous sums of money is 30 days. That's just impossible.
This completely writes off the difficulty of and time required to build a great mobile app. If it was simple and easy Reddit would have just made their own instead of buying out an existing one.
It's irrelevant to the topic, but I actively dislike Reddit and would be happy for it to die. I use old school forums more than anything else online. Reddit killed those.
