
Reddit, where chaos thrives, tries to clean up to attract ads from big brands - elorant
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-10-05/reddit-where-chaos-thrives-tries-to-clean-up-to-attract-dollars-from-big-brands
======
TeMPOraL
Well, as the disease of advertising progresses, Reddit too will shed all that
made it interesting. It so happens that first to go are the people almost
universally considered undesirable, but it won't stop at that.

~~~
mwyah
I dislike advertising as much as the next guy but really, what alternatives do
websites like reddit have?

~~~
TeMPOraL
Individual donations, subscriptions, being treated as a goodwill or marketing
expense by a company doing working in some tangentially related space (the way
YCombinator keeps HN running), are some ideas free of the problems of
advertising.

Here the core advertising-related problem is _third party_ advertising. Were
Reddit the co. to have some other business of their own that they advertised
on Reddit in order to fund the site, there would still be ads, but they
wouldn't interfere with the site itself. Here however, Reddit has to be
neutered so that it appeals to generic advertisers - any content or
communities that _they, the third parties_ may find objectionable must go.

It's hard to a site as Reddit to pivot from the status quo to any of the more
reasonable business models, because they were started with third-party
advertisements in mind from the get go. The fatal disease was transmitted at
birth, but it's only now that it closes on to the terminal stage. Once you get
people used to free, it's hard to start charging money, and Reddit the company
doesn't have any other business that could fund the site pro bono.

~~~
id_21150930
"Once you get people used to free, it's hard to start charging money"

You can leave your core offering free/ad-encumbered, but add additional
services (ideally, replicate your complements)

For example, YouTube started off as free / ad sponsored, but look at the
incredible revenue streams they have added:

• Patreon-like subscription model

• Merch integration with spring-tee

• Music / Premium / TV subscription <\--- this is most likely the largest
revenue stream after ads.

Now Reddit could be similar by adding:

• Paid feeds for sexual content (r/sexsells), trading, crypto, art, etc.

• Sponsored "TV mode" streams for major news / sports outlets

• Verified status subscription?

• Ability to post longer, Reddit hosted, videos behind a paywall with a
preview.

I'm just spitballing ideas which certainly have their complexities and
challenges, but free user-generated content is a great way to acquire users
for fractions of a penny.

That userbase is reddit's competitive advantage when building any number of
additional services.

------
mxcrossb
I’m not sure why any company would pay money to advertise there, when you can
easily buy upvotes instead. Sure it takes a little more creativity and a
longer investment, but if the current front page is any guide, there are
plenty of organizations that can do it.

~~~
maeln
Ad works differently than normal post. Even if your post make it to the front
page, it will only be displayed once. Also, it mean the user either need to be
looking at r/all or popular, or be subscribed to the subreddit.

Ad are display several time per page and will be display whatever subreddit
the user is currently on.

~~~
Traster
There's a good reason why podcast hosts read the ad copy. Even if an advert is
obviously an advert - if it comes from a trusted source it's still more
effective. The adverts which are astro-turfed as real posts are more effective
simply because they seem to be endorsed by the community you're a part of.

~~~
PaulKeeble
It also isn't legal throughout most of the western world so it is a pretty
risky thing to be doing. Saying that no one has cracked down on the youtube
channels that repeatedly do it nor websites that have been utilising it for 15
years so I guess it is pretty hard to start prosecuting now, it won't be
Reddit that shows the necessity of applying that law.

~~~
Traster
There actually has been enforcement: [https://www.asa.org.uk/rulings/mondelez-
uk-ltd-a14-275018.ht...](https://www.asa.org.uk/rulings/mondelez-uk-
ltd-a14-275018.html#.VHWcAWSsXvQ)

------
JohnTClark
Can someone explain to me or point to some studies or books that explain why
brands, advertisers etc. think that having small problematic groups on a
platform affects the brand? You are making an ad for group A and put the ad on
subreddits visited by group A, is the "dirt" produce by group B that bad for
you that you need to get rid of group B?

~~~
buboard
There's activist groups that target advertisers to "let them know" about a
platform. They often work as mobs that basically blackmail both the
advertisers and the platforms with bad publicity. Advertisers are all about
publicity, and so far all of them have caved in (Not sure if they 've ever
tried the alternative). Like everything in advertising, i doubt you can find a
single decent study about performance.

~~~
tgtweak
It's much more that these brands' marketing budgets and campaigns are managed
by companies that lose contracts like this when a shareholder, partner,
customer or press article brings it to their attention.

At the ecosystem level this works - groups generating content that is
undesirable (perspective being from the advertisers and their stakeholders)
are demonetized and -in cases where policing doesn't happen - entire networks.

No publisher or network is immune to this, even Google.

It's the macro digital equivalent to boycotting and lobbying and it's
effective. Advertisers have a say in where they put their money, and their
money indirectly and in some cases directly enables that content.

Best you can hope for is transparency and consistency in how the policy is
governed.

------
neals
As with everything internet: good doesn't last. Now that Reddit has started
its demise, where do we flok to next?

~~~
foldr
You're saying this on HN: a site that's vastly more regulated than reddit ever
has been or is likely to be.

I'm old enough to remember reddit before the days of subreddits. It wasn't a
magnet for extreme content back then. That happened as a result of subreddits.

~~~
Aozi
>It wasn't a magnet for extreme content back then. That happened as a result
of subreddits.

This.

And it's not just reddit. As long as you can create subgroups within
communities you're eventually going to attract some problematic people. While
something like CP on tumblr really brought it to light, tumblr was and still
is home to some insanely extreme ideologies. Ideologies that some people find
completely idiotic but which others truly believe in.

It's the same with other places, in case you weren't aware, Instagram has a
ton of CP as well. With tags you can find dedicated groups of various
different ideologies, a lot of them extremely problematic.

Same with Facebook and its tags/groups/whatever.

And of course Reddit and its subs.

This all stems from the fact that separating content into categories and tags
that people can freely define, means that for people looking for extreme
ideologies, it's trivial to find an echo chamber with just a tag or two.

~~~
arkh
What is the problem with having extreme or dumb ideologies?

Without extreme views you can't have progress: in a lot of countries, being
for homosexual rights or abortion is extreme.

~~~
foldr
Try imagining that you're hosting reddit yourself. Pretty easy to see what the
problem is from that point of view. Do you want to be hosting and enabling
child porn, hate speech, terrorism, etc. etc.?

~~~
arkh
I'd like people to remember that some people's terrorists are other people's
freedom fighters. Same thing with hate speech. And the age of consent is not
the same everywhere: maybe (I hope not) people against child porn will be
labeled bigots somewhere one day.

~~~
foldr
Well, if you're happy to host all that, why not just set up your own reddit?
The software is open source.

I think you might find that dealing with the legal consequences isn't a lot of
fun. And I wonder if you'd really be so blasé about enabling that kind of
content once you were actually looking at it on a daily basis.

------
sudoaza
Not even the internet is safe from gentrification.

~~~
m12k
I'd argue it's almost the other way around. Ever since the internet got
popular with companies it's mostly been very 'clean' in that most websites
represent a single company or community and you could easily stick to seeing
only 'approved' content. Now with 'social media', the internet is finally
seeing the real messiness of the real world and places where all types
congregate.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Social media is best viewed not as Internet sites, but as mini-Internets spun
on top of the real one. A company fanpage or company subreddit is the same as
company site on the real Internet. A subreddit or community group is the
equivalent of an Internet forum of pre-social-media days. The main difference
is that all these mini-Internets are fully centralized, controlled each by a
single corporate entity, and monetized through advertisement and surveillance.

------
s9w
> known for provocative discussions and fringe groups

??? After the recent cleanups, there is basically only porn, video games and
democratic talking points left. There is nothing even remotely provocative
that isn't framed by huge warning signs

------
jimworm
What are those "big brands" willing to accept? If their ads appear on a
different sub to those they consider objectionable content, would that be
considered sufficiently "clean"? Is there a value placed on moderation, and if
so, how much value is captured by individual moderators and how will it be
allocated?

Perhaps the most important factor in these communities is that most content is
junk anyway, requiring mental effort from the reader to remove and avoid.
That's what the whole voting thing is for. An advert would be "superjunk" \-
unwanted content that also has editorial control. It might be an illusion that
a community is full of value to be skimmed off, when reality is that the junk
is at barely maintainable levels and a little more might push it over the
brink.

------
buboard
Reddit is already at the tipping point. I don't know if u ve checked out
Mastodon or Riot but they look pretty good already. Basically everything non-
heavily-leftist is looking for alternatives. My use of it is limited to some
technical and well-moderated subreddits, the rest is just an endless parade of
juvenile leftisness. Twitter has become more conductive for serendipitous
discovery and lols these days, and they re getting better at helping ignore
idiots.

------
dclusin
I wonder if reddit has explored fostering or monetizing commerce that happens
on reddit. Wherever people congregate there will often be commerce, formally
or informally. But that presents its own set of problems as well.

------
atupis
I think problem with Reddit advertising is that you at least could not before
doing laser-focused campaigns like try to advertise people who are subscribed
to ReasonML and sysadmin subreddits.

------
neonate
[http://archive.is/CxvLo](http://archive.is/CxvLo)

------
durnygbur
Ad/brand driven reddit is the end of reddit and means that a new alternative
will appear and we don't know yet what it'll be - finally exciting times for
the web, again.

------
longtom
The notion that big brands do not want to advertise in "chaos" seems
suspicious to me. In real life, there are Gucci ads right next to the homeless
and drug addicts. People vandalize public ads with swastikas, Hitler beards
and other sh*t, but brands do not care. Such incentives simply do not exist in
real life, because nobody will realistically associate the ads with their
coincidental context such as vandalism. I'm not seeing why this should be
different on the internet. If it is, then I'd be interested in studies
actually providing evidence for that.

~~~
m12k
I think Reddit is one of the only places on the internet that mirrors the
diversity and messiness of the real world - but that's not the case for pretty
much all the rest of the internet, so people's assumptions and expectations
are based on that instead. In the real world, when Gucci has an ad next to a
drug gang hideout, they don't worry that they will have to explain to anyone
that they're not associated with or condoning the drug gang. That's not the
expectation on the internet, because most websites represent a single business
or community, not an entire city worth of communities. So advertisers
rightfully fear the headlines like 'Gucci advertises on far-right forum'
instead of 'Gucci advertises in city in which far right people also live'.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Yup. I think a lot of people - even here, of all places - also don't realize
that Reddit and other generic social networks (Facebook, Instagram) aren't
like HN. They're like _the Internet_. That is, /r/programming is to Reddit
what HN is to WWW. Child porn groups on Instagram are to Instagram what child
porn sites are to the whole Internet. All those social networks, allowing for
bottom-up group creation, are micro-Internets over proprietary protocol (UI)
on top of HTTP, with free, unsquatted and browser-configurable DNS equivalent.

------
GoofballJones
Reddit learned too late about the user generated content business: Don't get
into the user generated content business.

~~~
raverbashing
Well, FB seems to be thriving on it.

