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Comment by l72 | Hacker News Reader

I tried to advertise a product to a very niche group on reddit. I just wanted to select 4 specific sub-reddits and advertise to anyone that was a member or viewed that reddit.

For some reason, reddit wouldn't let me advertise to 3 of the 4, and the 1 that they did let me advertise was very low volume (less than 100 members). I couldn't even get reddit to show a single ad, let alone have anyone click on it.

Facebook brought in way more traffic, and some of it did convert, but I feel like my advertising costs were too high there, since you can only specify more general interests. It seems like reddit, had their advertising platform actually worked, would have been the perfect place for me.

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Yes, this. Google and Facebook make it super easy to advertise. Whenever I've tried to advertise on Reddit, nothing shows up, I have no idea why, and the advertising UI gives me no clues.

I’m feeling bad for some unknown director at Reddit when their boss reads this thread.

Well, they are kind of failing at their job in a big way, likely costing the company billions of dollars in the process. I don’t feel that bad for them. 5% of other socials in revenue per user is comically bad.

Taking in $400M at this stage is already a pretty sure sign of failure and that they don't know how to run a business. Probably too many MBAs busy optimizing their career ascendancy to be concerned with pesky details like competently securing revenue streams. It's not that hard to show ads to self-selecting niche audiences.

“It’s not that hard to show ads to self-selecting niche audiences.”

Perhaps not. Honest question though: Have you tried, at scale?

Give me half a billion and I'll certainly try

An MVP might come handy (^_^)

I'm sure the masses they traded our demographic for makes up for it in their jaded little bubble.

If you've created something unusable, should you be in charge?

For years they delegated their advertising platform to a third party. Last I heard they were trying to build one in house, and I am not sure if they succeeded.

Ultimately it’s the board and the CEO that’s responsible for such an important issue. So if they are not already aware of it then I’m not really sure they are in a position to blame someone under them in the org chart.

They are probably too busy fighting against their own users and subreddits that keep them afloat. Too much ideology in there to make sense, business wise.

Or not. More adverts and it becomes gross. Paying to avoid adverts might be an option, and while this makes it a protection racket, I’d take it over adverts.

I wouldn’t call it a racket though since it’s entirely voluntarily to use Reddit, or not use it. And there’s also the possibility to set up other competing forums, with or without ads.

Reddit has gross adverts already: Huel, some self-help thing, naff Adobe ads endorsed by some Reddit superuser from a corner of the site I never read. I’d far rather they were relevant to the subs I do read.

If you could pay to remove them, would you?

I’d probably pay for a “premium” service that let me generically block stuff on Reddit - /r/popular is infested with a lot of stuff I’ll never be interested in.

On the other hand, organic material on Reddit generates traffic and has high conversion rates.

Why pay when you can get the same for free?

That is truly bizzare. I’m having trouble understanding the motivations of the board, after a Series E and a clearly useful business, they didn’t bother with making more money?

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