
Reddit’s Pitch deck to Advertisers - muratmutlu
http://www.slideshare.net/MikeCole1/reddit-secret-planforworlddomination-21258371?ref=http://www.digiday.com/platforms/reddits-pitch-to-advertisers/
======
jcampbell1
I buy a decent about of ads ($xxK) for my own bootstrapped company, and Reddit
offers communities that are ideal for us. However, as a Reddit user, I am
completely terrified of running ads on Reddit. The problem with Reddit is that
the users are taste makers of the internet, thus if they respond negatively to
your marketing, you will be irrevocably fucked. If reddit users get tired of
seeing your ad, then god help you because they will probably "1 star" you on
the whole damn internet.

I like Reddit, and I wish they had a way to do some sort of sponsorship. If I
advertise on Reddit, it damn sure better come across as me supporting the
site, not me annoying their users.

~~~
stephencanon
> the users are taste makers of the internet

Funniest thing I've read this week, thanks.

Redditors may be the tastemakers of a small incredibly self-referential corner
of the Internet, but have approximately zero influence on the Internet that
everyone else uses.

Of course, if you're considering advertising on reddit, then I assume your
target market has significant overlap with the reddit userbase (in which case
the risk isn't that redditors are tastemakers, it's that they are prone to
incredibly catchy herd cynicism).

~~~
dmor
That might have been the case 2 years ago, but it isn't anymore. 70M uniques
is a huge portion of the U.S. population, they're doing more traffic than Fox
News (which has a huge influence on another huge Internet population).

~~~
spizzo
fox news aims to influence the population, that's their goal. You're making an
apples to oranges comparison there.

------
zipop
I wish it wasn't the case but sadly reddit does not deliver for advertisers.
Any good pitch deck would include testimonials and case studies. Those ads on
slide 8 with thousands of comments are run many, many months if not longer to
collect all those comments. The comments I've received on my Reddit ads are a
litany of haters. Why advertise to people not willing to support their
advertisers and spend money? Not in every case but I have to believe by and
large this is true. I will say for their pitch deck, they are representing
their cat loving constituent well. So there's that.

~~~
chris11
I think reddit can deliver for marketing purposes. Tony, a marketing manager
at Amazon, has spent a decent amount of time on reddit, most of it on
r/gamedeals, and has generated a lot of sales and goodwill. In fact I think
that Amazon has gained a reputation of having better sales than steam does.
Unfortunately for reddit, he has done this by building relationships on the
site not by buying advertising. That subreddit is anti-advertising, they even
banned all affiliate links with the exception of three charities. So investing
in reddit can bring results, but ads don't always work.

~~~
just_observing
That subreddit is not anti-advertising.

Reddit runs a lot of ads where people will link to Amazon with their own
affiliate tag. So they are selling nothing, not really promoting anything,
just trying to get their affiliate cookie planted in as many browsers as
possible. There is also at least one sales aggregator site (which just scrapes
price feeds) which does the same. It is that sort of ad which the sub readers
do not like.

A genuine ad from a company would be welcome but as you have pointed out
Amazon and others have built their rep without ads so finding a reason for
them to suddenly spend is going to be hard.

------
salimmadjd
Thanks for sharing but please clean the URL so it that doesn't credit a
different site for referral URL
(?ref=[http://www.digiday.com/platforms/reddits-pitch-to-
advertiser...](http://www.digiday.com/platforms/reddits-pitch-to-
advertisers/))

[http://www.slideshare.net/MikeCole1/reddit-secret-
planforwor...](http://www.slideshare.net/MikeCole1/reddit-secret-
planforworlddomination-21258371?ref=http://www.digiday.com/platforms/reddits-
pitch-to-advertisers/)

------
Maxious
Slide 10 "Take over a subreddit" is interesting. "Lets you include brand
messaging, customised layouts and background colors".

I wonder how r/HailCorporate (a subreddit that outs PR companies that spam and
manipulate reddit) would feel about their layout being changed.

~~~
nthitz
Hmm. As far as I've seen these ads are just 350x250 and 300x100 blocks. I've
never seen the layout or styling of a subreddit modified for an ad. And I
imagine many of the communities being very upset if this did happen (Imagine
EA branded /r/gaming).

So that second bullet point seems confusing as I've never seen that and the
two ads types they are selling don't seem to offer that capability. Has anyone
ever seen the sort of ad that slide describes??

edit: I guess they do have that sort of functionality on reddit.tv but that
doesn't seem to be what the slide deck is offering to me.

~~~
jedberg
They usually ask the moderators if it is ok for that particular sponsor. Never
had a mod say no though, since the sponsorship is usually pretty targeted and
appropriate.

~~~
clicks
Have you ever had potential-sponsors request ownership of certain subreddits
(for $, if it comes down to it)? I understand for big subreddits that wouldn't
make sense (e.g., userbase would not take it kindly if r/funny was just bought
(i.e. made ruling moderator of r/funny) one day by some media company). But
I'm curious what would be the result of, say, the bicycling company Trek
trying to become owners of the r/bicycles subreddit.

~~~
jedberg
"Ownership" of a reddit is not for sale, and never has been. The most you can
do is get sponsorship rights for however long you want to pay for. However, a
sponsor will never have control over the content (unless they manage to get
someone on the moderator list I suppose, but they could do that regardless of
sponsorship status).

------
iuguy
We looked into Reddit a while back for advertising. The two main problems we
encountered were that much of reddit is the wrong sort of traffic - people
that don't convert, people that expect something for nothing and get upset
(and vocal) when it doesn't happen and so on.

In order to run a successful campaign on reddit it seems you need to engage
with the community in the subreddits you're targeting, but engaging with that
community can be done without advertising, so the benefit of advertising is
somewhat diminished.

------
zacmartin
I work in a media agency and would love to sell in Reddit to my clients but if
you've ever tried to use it as an advertiser it's an extremely poor offering.
Sadly, this sales deck does nothing to change my perception.

~~~
_lex
What makes it a poor offering?

~~~
hkmurakami
Additionally, what would make it a better offering for your industry?

~~~
josh2600
Ahem!!!

Here are the problems with Reddit Ads off the top of my head:

1) either all reddit or one subreddit. 1a) no easy way to advertise on
multiple subreddits 2) no way to be an agency. So painful to manage multiple
accounts even with RES 3) no API 4) no support 5) limited ad units

In short, I would love to advertise on r/SysAdmin but I can't justify spending
$20 a day for <100 clicks. Give me the ability to advertise to all of Reddit
or specific subreddits. Seriously, why can't I just advertise on a set of
subreddits? They should give it to me for the same price as all of reddit.
Why? Because that gives me control of my brand. I don't want to advertise on
all of reddit because there are a lot of subreddits I don't want my brand
associated with, but if I could bid across multiple subreddits I would use the
self-service a lot more.

Admittedly, I haven't looked at the reddit ad units in about a year, and I
know they're looking for a softdev to build a new ad platform, but geez, can I
get a real ad experience please? Reddit has so many pageviews, let me tap
that!

~~~
coderdude
Reddit now lets you target multiple sub-reddits at $30/day/sub-reddit.

~~~
josh2600
Right but that's the wrong model. You're penalizing me for wanting to control
my brand. What if I want to stack a whole bunch of small population
subreddits?

Personally, I think it should be solely by impressions, irrespective of
subreddit.

------
frakkingcylons
It's too bad there isn't more substance in the slides. At this point, Reddit's
current system of advertising works well for few other than those posting
Amazon links with affiliate tags and a link-bait title. If you're going to
even think of advertising on Reddit, it works best when you advertise on
highly-relevant subreddits with either at least 50K subscribers or one with a
very tight-knit community (like many of the city subreddits). Be
straightforward and don't use much marketing fluff in the title otherwise you
can expect to get some negative comments from hypercritical Redditors.

~~~
hkmurakami
Agreed, I think "goodwill" is incredibly important for advertisers to either
(1) already have, or (2) convey strongly to the subreddit community.

~~~
frakkingcylons
To be fair, I should mention that it's only important if you're either (1)
advertising with a very high bid for a reasonable amount of time or (2)
promoting your product organically by posting it as a link/self-text post. For
the first case, it's beneficial to have the appearance of good-intentions if
comments are enabled. For the second case, it's critical because your exposure
is determined based on your score from upvotes and downvotes.

------
thenomad
The biggest problem with Reddit advertising currently is the pricing. Even if
you're advertising on a large subreddit - the only way to target your ads,
really - it tends to work out rather expensive for what you're getting.
Obviously some people are making it work, and it's probably cheaper on the
_really_ large subreddits.

The reason for this is their odd "pay per day" system, which has a $30
minimum.

However, they're moving to a CPM system soon, I'm told, which will make Reddit
a very interesting ad opportunity.

------
kybernetyk
Do they offer advertising for international advertisers yet? Because last time
I checked you absolutely needed a US credit card. (I'm from Germany.)

~~~
NameNickHN
They still offer advertising only to cardholders from the US, Canada and the
UK. I really need to advertise on Reddit for a Reddit related website.

~~~
celticninja
Couldnt you get a US or UK resident to pay for you? You could reimburse the
person with bitcoin.

~~~
NameNickHN
Would if I could but it's not like there are agencies that you can easily find
via your favorite search engine.

------
staunch
They're playing up the subreddits, but the truth is that there are very few
truly popular subreddits (that aren't default ones or NSFW). If they could
_just_ figure out how to grow a bunch more subreddits they could make so much
more money.

Plus, it'd make the site a whole lot better for users if the site's traffic
was spread out across more interesting topics.

~~~
hkmurakami
Genuinely curious: at what point (numerically) would you consider a subreddit
to be "popular" and how many subreddits currently fall into that category?

~~~
frakkingcylons
I'd personally consider the tipping point around 50,000 subscribers. From my
personal experience with organically promoting a website on a subreddit with
~60K subscribers, a #1 post on a subreddit of that size garners around 6k to
7k clicks in one day. Afterwards over the next 3 days or so, the link would
get around 3k clicks.

~~~
TkTech
There's at least 234 subreddits with 50000+ subscribers[1] ...that's a fair
number of highly targeted marketing channels.

[1]: <http://redditlist.com/>

~~~
hkmurakami
I took a glance at the list and a lot of those subreddits aren't really
suitable for advertisement targets.

I'd guess that 2/3 of those 234 subreddits are addressable, so maybe 150 is a
reasonable estimate.

~~~
ImprovedSilence
>> I took a glance at the list and a lot of those subreddits aren't really
suitable for advertisement targets

entirely dependent on what you want to market...

------
Ologn
The main thing I advertise is my Android apps. When I advertise on places like
Google or Twitter, I can target only people using an Android device. I can
then further fine tune it to people who are searching for certain words
(Google) or who are searching/tweeting certain words (Twitter).

Reddit does not have this type of targeting by platform. I'm not sure why that
is. It would probably take me about 24 hours to write an MVP script that would
serve a different ad dependent on platforms. I would certainly at least try
them out if they allowed targeting by platform like the major advertising
networks do. And if I tried them out and I seemed to be getting a decent ROI,
why wouldn't I keep using them?

------
searchergss
Expected more from the Reddit deck than that. But, hey, that's an unreasonable
expectation?

~~~
baby
It does look unprofessional. I wonder if this is a tactic to show how easy
they are to get in touch with? Like "easy advertising".

~~~
mcintyre1994
I think they do it that way in an attempt to filter the advertisers to only
those who have a chance of getting success. If that slide deck says to you
that the environment is too unprofessional for your advertising money, you
were almost certainly going to fail to appear to Redditors anyway. Nobody
benefits when advertisers fail, so letting advertisers self filter with a not
very subtly unprofessional deck is a great idea.

------
getglue
The problem with Reddit Ads is the average Reddit user leaves your site within
the first couple of seconds.

~~~
NameNickHN
This holds true with visitors from every source, unless it's highly targeted
traffic.

------
onlyup
If you advertise on Reddit.. who are you advertising to? If I am in /r/sport
(for example), does the advertiser know my gender, my prefered sports (through
other subreddit subscriptions), my other interests, my age, my schedule, my
social connections/network, my upvoting history, what sports stuff I am most
likely to click, whether I like funny stuff, gossipy stuff, serious stuff,
factually dense stuff?

Reddit could build profiles on people or even ask for that information in the
signup form but their users will not like that one bit.

In addition I would be worried about the age demographic lowering dramatically
(my opinion, not a fact) in recent years.

~~~
jedberg
> Reddit could build profiles on people or even ask for that information in
> the signup form but their users will not like that one bit.

They could, but by not doing that, I think it makes the users much more
comfortable knowing that reddit specifically protects its users from that kind
of intrusion.

> In addition I would be worried about the age demographic lowering
> dramatically (my opinion, not a fact) in recent years.

The median age actually goes up every year. The kids just get louder. :)

~~~
onlyup
Your second point is very interesting. I wonder why that is... and how you
know if that info isn't collected?

------
QuantumGood
"The Front Page of the Internet" is used as a frequent source by many
profitable blogs. Reddit could just start their own, using itself as a source
like so many others do.

------
bowmessage
I'm not quite sure the kitten with lightning coming out of its eyes is going
to appeal to the major brand owners...

~~~
NameNickHN
I think it's a subtle way to weed all those companies out, that don't get
reddit. I mean, if you don't understand the reference, how can you understand
Reddit and its users?

~~~
bowmessage
Sorry, what's the reference to? I'm a big reddit user and don't really get it
:/

------
cagenut
$0.75 CPM, 2 impressions per page, 5B pageviews a month, and lets say 10% of
inventory sold (which from personal/anecdotal experience seems generous)...
$9M/year in revenue?

~~~
hncommenter13
Interesting. Any chance you'd be willing to chat a bit about your
personal/anecdotal experience with the 10% fill rate? If so, my email is in my
profile (didn't see one in yours or on your blog, sorry).

------
smackfu
It seems much cheaper to just astroturf yourself in appropriate reddits. Or
heck, make a compelling ad, like those Dove spots, and redditors will promote
it for you.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Astroturfing makes you end up on /r/HailCorporate.

------
archagon
Uh, do the slides shrink with every click for anyone else?

~~~
RyJones
Yes. Chrome on iOS

------
efesak
Yeah but still ignoring international customers.

------
cm2012
I have noticed that for many new ads (not mine) you cant avoid cynical anti
corporate comments.

------
rpgmaker
So can people now stop saying that twitter+facebook killed digg?

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ziko
I thought it's a joke until 7th or 8th slide.

------
rscale
This is far more effective than the collateral I saw from them 2 or 3 years
ago. Glad to see they're making a more serious attempt to monetize.

I don't quite understand the constraints on the branded subreddits. That seems
like it could be effective if done carefully and disastrous if done bluntly.

