Reddit is ready for advertisers, but are advertisers ready for Reddit?
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It's common to find top posts titled along the lines of "My SO and I recreated our first date at <fastfood joint>" or "The store where I work wanted to burn these clothes but I saved them: <link to image with cloths from a specific designer>".
Sometimes top comments were obviously made by advertisers where someone asks for a better alternative of a product depicted in the post and another one answers only 1 minute later with high praise for another product.
I don't believe that every mention of a product is directly advertising but I noticed a steep increase of users mentioning products directly by name and model number over the time.
Also, as I understand it, they have been working on catching this stuff behind the scenes and they seem to be doing okay.
Because it already is
But Reddit was built on fake activity, so what is new.
It might have a better return on investment than ads.
I think you've over generalizing a bit - I think we've gotten to the point where reddit is fairly "mainstream." My bet is there are plenty of reddit users out there not using ad blockers.
There was a time when playing multi-player FPS games against other people on the internet was a "fringe activity" probably mostly enjoyed by a very small subset of the population. Now 40 year old I-bankers blow off steam playing Halo. I think reddit has just about gotten to that level.
If you take a look at /r/popular it's mostly nonsense. The majority of reddit are looking at cute animals and memes about tv, movies, and video games.
People have been proclaiming the end of Reddit since before Digg's downfall.
Do you have a source for that? I don't find it impossible to believe, but that's a pretty bold claim. I'm sure a lot of people use ad blockers, but how does that number compare to total user volume? And how does it break down (engaged users, infrequent visitors, etc.)?
Or I just pay for Reddit Gold, which removes ads (among other features).
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.
Additionally, HN is far, far less intelligent than its users would have you believe, but that circles back to the edgelord libertarianism again.
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.
You might want to ask a black person or an Indian for their perspective on this.
But of course with reddit, it's 100% up to you to make it good. Find the right communities, ditch the wrong ones, and you're going to have a great time.
"All over," no--it's mostly, though not always, contained to the topics at hand. Most times that Sheryl Sandberg or Ellen Pao or any group that would maybe like to encourage people who are not dudes to learn to code and maybe get a job come up, this has historically bubbled up. Similarly, topics that do not revolve around white (and occasionally South and/or East Asian) men usually come with a sidebar of pseudoscience-cloaked racism or the blurfing of "equality of opportunity" with its implications of inferiority.
It has certainly improved since 'dang and 'sctb took the reins. And you can't be an overt meme-turd here and get away with it. But adjusting one's pince-nez and well-actuallying into sexism and racism isn't really better, and on that HN has a ways to go.
As for bullying, I think we can all agree that vote-brigading, doxxing, trolling, and racist speech are far more prevalent on reddit than HN. /r/fatpeoplehate, /r/the_donald, /r/roastme, /r/murderedbywords being some good examples, not to mention incels and redpillers.
And yes their blindside is a persistent market failure, that I sadly cannot take advantage of.
Also what Tuff said applies more readily to various chans, less to reddit, which usually has more civilized discussions - A natural by-product of trying to piss off preferably less than 50% of the userbase with each post.
In the physical world you don't have to put ads directly next to the KKK, but if there's still some sort of demonstration passing your ad nobody is going to blame you for it there either.
Also the notion that the same people who use a website are going to blame an advertiser for advertising next to content that is the norm there, is just weird.
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.
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.)
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.
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)
It's not yet known if this model is viable, or sustainable. I certainly hope so, but time will tell.
Federation without scarcity or central control means that networks can splinter into tiny, insular subgroups.
And anyone can always stand up a new instance - if they can be bothered to. Running and moderating a forum or a subreddit is hard, and not everyone is willing to do it (either by refusing to start a new instance, or by administrating one poorly.)
Sometimes rifts can happen but the network never entirely fractures - at least this hasn't happened on the GNUSocial/Mastodon/etc network yet. By default everyone federates with everyone else, and there are enough instances that scisms are rare and isolated, and don't break the network.
>And anyone can always stand up a new instance - if they can be bothered to. Running and moderating a forum or a subreddit is hard, and not everyone is willing to do it (either by refusing to start a new instance, or by administrating one poorly.)
Not everyone needs to, though. You just need to find someone who is running an instance whose values are aligned with yours. There are several hundred Mastodon instances to choose from, it's easy to find such a place.
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.
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...
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.
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)
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.
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.
Every bit of UI, except the two main ones[1], leave a lot to be desired. Their moderation tools are still atrocious, despite promising for years to improve things.
[1] The list of submissions for any particular subreddit, and the subreddits therein. As far as I'm concerned, they absolutely nailed it, and should be wary of messing with a good thing.
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.
The day reddit starts shutting out 3rd party apps is the day I stop using 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.
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.
Lol.