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Comment by shabda | Hacker News Reader

> even the numbers you’ve cited wildly contradict each other

The idea of those two separate was that while they both contradict each other, they both prove the premiumness of reddit demographic.

> First, reddit’s own admins have called out these statistics as inaccurate

Link please.

You gave an unsubstantiated claim that Reddit demographic is

unattractive to advertisers, which are proven to be wrong by two most widely used site demographic markers. Showing two links which are hate speech, racism or worse etc don't prove that the demographic is not advertising friendly.

> I know reddit likes to think of itself as a community of intellectuals and sophisticates ...

Reddit doesn't need to be intellectual to command premium rates. If > 30% of its audience makes > 75K/yr, it has premium ad inventory. Have you seen Icanhascheeseburger's ad rates? :)

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Link, as requested: http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/experts-misunderestimate-our-...

I would just add that reddit’s difficulties selling its ad space—they’ve had to resort to serving Flash games and pretty pictures just to fill the advertising frame, though they spin this e.g. “Instead of an ad, here’s a flower/Just our way of saying thanks”—speak volumes about reddit’s ability to appeal to sponsors of the sort sought by Condé Nast.

They definitely have problems getting enough quality advertisers, but that may have something to do with them not having anyone (until recently?) whose job it is to sell ad space. Vogue does.

Just look at the recent IE9 debacle. It was an 'ask me anything'.

What MS responded with was crappy marketing speak, which would have worked on 'normal' people. Normal people would have swallowed it up. But Reddit did not - ie they are hard to monetize.

What... I can't even... If you can't fool people, they're hard to monetize? Have you tried being honest for a change?

Opera did an IAmA, had ten engineers answering every question in a very informative manner, and I feel that they got a million times better publicity than Microsoft ever did.

... and Opera is still a niche what 2% browser share?

It's not about 'fooling' people though. It's about people being overly skeptical, assuming everything is a scam, assuming conspiracy theories, ulterior motives.

I'm simply saying that the Reddit userbase is untrusting and not an easily monetizable demographic.

I wouldn't describe the response to the IE9 AMA as overly skeptical. People had some serious issues with what MS had done with IE in the past, and asked pointed questions. The response was lackluster, at best. I'm sure if they had just stuck their engineering team in there to begin with, it wouldn't have spun out of (MS's) control as it did. Microsoft screwed the pooch on that one. I don't think you can take that incident as being reflective of advertisers' experience on reddit.

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