
Reddit is ready for advertisers, but are advertisers ready for Reddit? - ohjeez
https://martechtoday.com/reddit-ready-advertisers-advertisers-ready-reddit-207382
======
brink
Why pay for ads when you can pay for vote manipulation and viral marketing
through organic posts? The cost / user engagement ratio has to be much better,
right?

~~~
ivarv
This is by far the best way to stretch your marketing dollar on reddit, but
(aside from AMAs) seems difficult for reddit themselves to monetize.

~~~
pen2l
Reddit as a monolith is pretty good at catching that. Sure it'll miss one or
two every now and then, but I don't see it being inundated by organic
marketing anytime soon.

Also, as I understand it, they have been working on catching this stuff behind
the scenes and they seem to be doing okay.

~~~
BoiledCabbage
> but I don't see it being inundated by organic marketing anytime soon.

Because it already is

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vita17
This is the end of Reddit. They can’t monetize the web version of their site
because their users are sophisticated enough to use ad blockers. If they load
up their mobile app with ads, people will just use a 3rd party Reddit app. So
they’ll have to ban 3rd party apps which will betray all the users who got
into Reddit because it was an open platform.

~~~
austenallred
I spend a lot of money advertising on Reddit. It does great. I’m extremely
happy.

~~~
gsylvie
What are you advertising? I'm thinking of running ads there for my Bitbucket
add-on.

------
wcarron
> take the most critical, bullying group of individuals on the internet and
> throw them into one community; that is Reddit,” said Tuff.

Hah! This guy must not use the web often. Also, for a guy who eventually hopes
to sell ads on the Reddit platform, he's not doing a great job of putting
lipstick on the pig.

~~~
seibelj
I would say HN is far more critical and bullying than reddit, but then again
we aren’t trying to lure advertisers

~~~
pjc50
HN is more critical but less bullying. It rarely tolerates open crude abuse,
but has a huge blind spot around "intellectual" bullying such as
""scientific"" racism.

~~~
wanderingjew
HN has a problem with the libertarian hellscape ideology of laws being an
impediment to wealth. I would argue this oppressive ideology is far more
violent than the dross that's skimmed off Reddit.

Additionally, HN is far, far less intelligent than its users would have you
believe, but that circles back to the edgelord libertarianism again.

~~~
thescribe
Ok so I get that you disagree but how is it violence?

~~~
wanderingjew
Oppression is violence [1]. The willful disregard of laws enacted by a
democratically elected legislature (from Uber's disregard of Taxi Medallions,
airbnb's disregard of occupancy laws, to 2008-era banking scandals) of the
upper class (successful entrepreneurs) is oppression against the lower
classes.

Usually, this is taken care of through the courts, wherein the judicial system
punishes people for crimes -- again, an act of violence. However, in the
absence of punishment or a judiciary aligned with the interests of oppressors,
the oppressed are morally justified in enacting punishment and responding to
violence in kind.

[1] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1967.

~~~
libertyEQ
Being against socialism is not violence. The idea that the taxi medallion
system was anything but a cartel is very crude. I'm not even sure what kind of
person writes these comments that are in stark disagreement to the founding
principles of the USA. Authoritarian governments are the exact violence the
USA was founded to get away from.

~~~
pjc50
> Authoritarian governments are the exact violence the USA was founded to get
> away from

You might want to ask a black person or an Indian for their perspective on
this.

~~~
libertyEQ
I don't have to "ask an Indian" because my grandfather is on the Dawes Rolls.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawes_Rolls](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawes_Rolls)

------
zitterbewegung
Advertisers haven’t been ready for reddit for awhile.

Who wants their content associated with hate groups ? Trolls ? Adult content ?
Moderators who are mistreated by staff. Staff that modifies other peoples
comments ? And once they are ready maybe reddit won’t be what people want
anymore .

Also, the fact that social media advertisers can do the ads cheaper . Why pay
for something you can do for much less?

I guess reddit has a PR agency trying to push them so that advertisers will
take the bait.

~~~
Mindwipe
> Who wants their content associated with hate groups ? Trolls ? Adult content
> ? Moderators who are mistreated by staff. Staff that modifies other peoples
> comments ?

That's like the typical advertising experience with a print newspaper.

(This is somewhat satirical, I'm not suggesting that it's a sustainable long
term situation.)

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Sir_Cmpwn
I've been saying for a couple of years now that Reddit is on a clear downward
spiral. Do you believe me yet?

The right approach is federation with small, user-operated instances that all
talk to each other GNUSocial/Mastodon style. That's the _only_ way to make
sustainable social networks that work in the interests of their users.
Capitalism-driven social networks _do not work_.

~~~
LambdaComplex
> I've been saying for a couple of years now that Reddit is on a clear
> downward spiral. Do you believe me yet?

People have been saying that for years, and yet Reddit is still here. (With
that said, I do agree with the rest of your comment)

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Digg's still here, too.

------
Alex3917
> Those concerns range from worries that ads will appear on controversial
> “subreddits,” or topic-based message forums, to fears of campaigns being
> flayed alive by Redditors on anti-advertising subreddits like HailCorporate.

Let's be honest, the problem is that the vast majority of marketers are really
dumb and terrible at their jobs — they only want to do things that have
already been "proven to work", even though by far the highest ROI goes to
those who go first.

That's not to say there isn't a lot of fucked up stuff happening on Reddit,
but that isn't the real issue here.

~~~
gk1
How many marketers do you know? I'm glad to see you edited "99% of marketers"
to "vast majority of marketers," but that still reeks of a generalization
based on personal opinion and not fact.

~~~
Alex3917
> How many marketers do you know?

I've talked with hundreds or thousands. But the underlying idea comes from
Seth Godin, who I'm sure has talked with at least an order of magnitude more.
He has lots of posts on this theme, e.g.:

[http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2012/07/the-
importan...](http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2012/07/the-importance-
of-going-first.html)

It's trivially easy to test the idea, just going on Bumble Networking (most
people are marketers) and offer some new product or service that is obviously
a no brainer. It doesn't matter if the thing you're selling doesn't actually
exist, as long as it would be clearly beneficial. And just keep track of how
much interest you actually get, versus people who just want to "make an
instagram" or whatever.

~~~
gk1
I don't see what first-mover advantage has to do with Reddit as a marketing
channel. Plenty of companies are already advertising there, and there are
plenty of reasons why others aren't doing the same besides being "really dumb
and terrible at their jobs.

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jasonkostempski
Any brand that only sells things that work as advertised and isn't backed by a
tone-deaf marketing department should be able to hold up against any "brand-
safety concerns". If they could also accept that no one wants to be tracked
and that they should trust the people they're working with to report semi-
accurate impression numbers instead of trying to use user machines as
arbiters, maybe they could pull off some in-line advertising. While I've never
seen a unicorn, I can't prove they don't exist. Good luck Reddit.

------
dimillian
I'm a huge fan of Reddit, it's basically where I got my info about everything
in my life. It's like an up to date, curated version of the mess that some
news site are. Plus conversations is highly interesting most of the time. Of
course, you have to follow the good one, and read what you want to read.

------
preinheimer
I tried advertising on Reddit earlier this year. I picked a few subreddits,
whipped out my credit card, picked a few key phrases, and figured I was ready
to go.

The advertising UI left a lot to be desired. I was hoping to run multiple
versions of the same ad to test CTR, no dice. I could set up multiple ads,
wait for them each to be approved, then manually make changes through
molasses, possibly with additional approvals after each one.

I've used Google Ads, Bing, and some of those "curated" networks before. All
of them felt like they wanted to help me succeed (so I'd give them more
money). Using the Reddit system felt like a fight I was losing the whole time.

(at the time they were segregating advertisers into the like 10K+ spenders,
and others. we were in the others category)

~~~
TorKlingberg
This feels like an impossible game. Reddit's advertising UI will never have as
many features as Google's. Just compare how many engineers each company has.

~~~
preinheimer
Absolutely google can throw more people at the problem.

I'd settle for:

\- Let me run multiple versions of an ad, run more of the one that has the
best CTR.

\- Once you've got my money, and have seen a few of my ads, never require
approval again unless I've been bad.

\- Label all graphs clearly.

\- Give me an estimate of how many ads will show at various bids.

~~~
tomjen3
Once you've got my money, and have seen a few of my ads, never require
approval again unless I've been bad.

That will never fly, for the sole reason that reddit is small enough and young
enough that they could be run over by somebody willing to drop 10 grand.
Googles spam filter is probably the best.

------
makecheck
Reddit tries way too hard to funnel people into their app, which I assume
gives them more options for uncontrollable ad spam.

Dark patterns that constantly advertise apps really need to go.

On mobile I prefer the desktop Reddit site due to high link density and the
fact that, frankly, browsers are BETTER because of trivial pinch/zoom/scroll,
opening in new tabs, etc.

Instead, Every Single Time I visit Reddit I have to deal with a stupid loading
animation, then a _massive_ message covering half my phone screen giving me
only two options (App or Mobile Site), just so the page will load to the point
where I can use the Request Desktop Site command. The experience sucks now,
and if they make it worse I will simply _stop_ using Reddit instead of hopping
on board.

~~~
bllguo
There are countless 3rd party mobile apps for Reddit. Very odd that you don't
mention them at all.

~~~
Crespyl
And all of them are vast improvements over both the official app and the new
"mobile" site.

The day reddit starts shutting out 3rd party apps is the day I stop using
reddit.

------
gsylvie
I don't mind the promoted Triplebyte ad I see at the top of my reddit landing
page. I'm subscribed to r/git and r/programming; I suspect it's coming from my
r/programming subscription. My ad-blocker is enabled for reddit, but the
Triplebyte promoted ad still gets through. I guess it's not really an ad but a
promoted topic. It even has the upvote/downvote buttons. It's been there for
probably the last month.

~~~
compumike
(I work at Triplebyte.) Thanks, that's great to hear! It works for us too --
we can easily measure that we've created a lot of great career opportunities
for engineers who came to us via the r/programming promoted post.

------
faizmokhtar
It's much better for advertisers to astroturf on reddit.

------
ben_jones
I don't think mainstream advertising that appeals to the general public will
ever be successful on Reddit. Niche advertising, such as recruiting and
product placement in subs like /r/sysadmin, or fanduel in /r/nfl, will have
mild success - but not enough to make Reddit profitable. Ironically I think
imgur will have more success then Reddit in the long run.

~~~
jlarocco
>I don't think mainstream advertising that appeals to the general public will
ever be successful on Reddit.

Mainstream advertising doesn't appeal to the general public. People tolerate
it because they don't know they can turn it off.

If web browsers shipped with ad-blocking turned on by default then most people
would never turn it off.

------
zbentley
> To ensure those whitelisted subreddits stay safe, Reddit monitors the posts
> published to them using language analysis technology. If it finds posts that
> violate its quality standards, it turns off ads for that subreddit.

That's surprisingly honorable. I worry that, if Reddit is faced with more
financial struggles in the future, this would be among the first things to
change. Imagine if, instead of programmatically terminating advertisements and
having a human check the content for moderation, they programmatically removed
the _content_ instead of the ads.

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QAPereo
If advertisers are edgy about something as locked down as YouTube, they’re
going to be positively terrified of Reddit.

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jsonne
The 500lb gorilla in the room that no one is talking about when it comes to
Reddit ads is this. Go to Reddit right now and hit the "All" button and just
see how much hardcore pornography pops up immediately. I'm not making some
sort of moral judgement here at all, but that can and does scare off tons of
big brands.

~~~
nhebb
I don't think NSFW content is shown by default - it needs to be enabled in
your account preferences.

~~~
atwebb
It is absolutely shown by default for /r/all, however the default ("popular")
view and default subs for a login exclude NSFW.

~~~
dsr_
I just opened up an incognito window and hit /r/all. In the first two pages, I
saw nothing NSFW except a joke about a hotel survey which mentions a hooker
that would certainly pass on network television.

------
post_break
As a moderator for a large branded subreddit, get ready for user revolt.

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alvil
... And are users ready for ads?

~~~
toxican
The site already has ads. Sidebar ads, banner ads, ads that look like regular
submissions to the site. Not to mention the more natural advertising that
/r/hailcorporate likes to freak out about a lot.

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djstein
> yes

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jnordwick
"... take the most critical, bullying group of individuals on the internet and
throw them into one community; that is Reddit,” said Tuff.

Lol.

~~~
sctb
Would you mind following the guidelines by only posting civilly and
substantively?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
jnordwick
Sorry. It's such an awesome description though.

