Reddit’s Pitch deck to Advertisers | Hacker News Reader

Reddit’s Pitch deck to Advertisers

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169 pointsmuratmutlu115 comments

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.

I imagine the thing to do would be to test your ads on a very small subset of the site first, and judge the response.

That is a valid suggestion, but remember one comment is all it takes to turn a self promotor into a borderline rapist in the eyes of the internet. https://www.google.com/search?q=woody+harrelson+reddit

If you are familiar with the incident, you should see that particular comment was really just fuel in the greater fire. Harrelson did not just make a tiny blunder in one comment; he turned all of reddit against him with his repeated attempts to steer the AMA towards Rampart, and they proceeded to locate dirt on him.

If you are unnerved by 'the Rampart incident', take comfort knowing that it has been 15 months, and no one has committed a blunder of that magnitude since (as evidenced by the fact that we still use it as the go-to example)

> If you are unnerved by 'the Rampart incident', take comfort knowing that it has been 15 months, and no one has committed a blunder of that magnitude since

Didn't you hear about the Morgan Freeman thing? It was a running joke for about 2 weeks (but it obviously did not affect Morgan Freeman in the least). It eventually died down, but I think the reason people dislike the Rampart thread so much was because it was one of the first of its kind (the archetype of bad AMAs, if you will).

I think you're worrying about it too much and are looking at it from a very reddit-centric point of view. Like the example of Woody Harrelson, his terrible AMA in no way hurt his career.

A better example would be Hipmunk though, it's created by Huffman (later joined by Ohanian) and they advertise pretty solidly on reddit. The comments for the ads are pretty negative despite the reddit history, but Hipmunk is still doing quite well.

I think you'll do fine with a test run advertising on reddit, if you're that worried about it I'm pretty sure you can turn comments off for ads so they won't be able to see that other people don't like them.

Comments were negative, but still, I learned about Hipmunk through reddit and now do check Hipmunk (and many others) when I need a plane ticket.

Hipmunk is definitely one of the worst sites in it's category

Depends where you're living I think. I live in Europe and, besides not displaying easyjet, ryanair and the other lowcost companies, it displays good prices.

But what really gets me is the UI. It's my favorite one out of all the websites I know.

How will you compare it with Momondo?

Beats Momondo hands down. I'd never heard of Momondo, so I just checked it out.

Hipmunk's UI is WAY better for me trying to pick flights. I don't care that I might save $10 or whatever, as much as avoiding 8 hour layovers, or leaving at 5am. You can't easily tell any of that with an interface like Momondo's (which is just a pretty version of every other travel site).

You have to use the sidebar after you have done your search, then you can specify the details that you want and compare.

You can put a max on travel-time and choose which part of the day that you want to travel in.

Have you used Hipmunk? It's NOTHING like that at all.

Those sidebar features are the same on every travel website, except Hipmunk. The linear bar graph display of flights is, for me, infinitely superior than a data tabel that I can drag sliders around to change the wall of text. It takes me a glance to see that there are great options or shitty options on a given hipmunk search, even on my iphone. Momondo and basically every other site require significantly more cognitive work on my part to piece apart their text boxes full of information to figure out if that flight is a good fit for my needs or not.

I tried both.

(Monmondo/Skyscanner) 162 vs 177 (himpunk)

And the UI just doesn't matter with these sites.. do search, ignore crazy prices, select the legs that suit you best..

But that's the part that Hipmunk makes easiest: figuring out which flights suit you best.

I live in Europe too and it doesn't display two of the most popular airlines?

I think it depends a lot on audience. Woody Harrelson - of course his career won't be negatively affected by a Reddit AMA. But a startup whose audience is largely techies that frequent Reddit? Maybe they should be slightly careful.

But slightly careful, not terrified.

It just means not stomping in totally ignorant about Reddit culture, which demands a higher standard from submissions (including advertisers) than from regular commenters. It means avoiding sounding like a PR drone, blatant lies, and avoiding coming across too arrogant.

The Harrelson AMA seems to have blown up because a few of his responses were pretty much interpreted by Reddit users as "I am above you peons, be honoured I'm spending time on talking to you about Rampart. Did I mention Rampart? Oh, and Rampart". Which is a bit like walking up to a wild animal and kicking it in the nuts. That it seemed like a PR effort in a setting like an AMA where people expect something else but are also quite wary about the intrusion of marketeers made it doubly bad - ads are different, we know their purpose is to sell a product, and so merely trying to sell the product won't cause a stink, whereas the first time Harrelson tried to steer the conversation to Rampart, he'd already made a grave mistake.

I'd think for advertising on Reddit, a limited run asking for feedback, and being responsive and friendly in comments would be a good start.

I've advertised something that wasn't universally loved on Reddit. Nothing particularly bad happened.

I've not used the system extensively, but I think if you don't choose one of the most aggressive subreddits and don't do anything really dumb, you'll be fine. Reddit users seem to accept advertising as a necessary evil.

Good! Thank GOD it's come to this. Let me share with you an old adage: "Good advertising is no more expensive than bad advertising: but at least it's good."

Don't approach this as a way to influence and convince users. Advertising should entertian, teach, engross, delight, the full spectrum of the human condition. After all, isn't that what your product is - something for humans? A part of people's actual lives?

I think if you approach advertising correctly you will find that it is your chance to be something more than lines of code or a manufacturing contract: it's your chance to be human.

That's a nice sentiment, but it doesn't actually address his concern. Even if he tries to make "good advertising", if Reddit happens to disagree, he'll get shellacked by the site's users; he'll be worse off than if he had just flushed the money down the toilet.

People with experience with Reddit advertising seem to be confirming some of his suspicion downthread.

I'm not sure it's possible to make "good advertising" targeting reddit that "reddit disagrees with". do you think I'm begging the question when I state that advertising targeting reddit is only good if reddit likes it?

(I don't think I am, because there could be another definition of good based only on whether it converts anyone at all - even if 100% of the viewership including the converted can't stand it.)

The problem isn't that it's possible to make good advertising that reddit disagrees with, it's that making advertising that's good in this context is either difficult or risky or both. And that trying and failing is worse than just burning the money spent on the advertising.

I don't get the sense from this thread that there's any push to make something that Reddit likes, though. There's a push to make something that 'works' or 'goes over'.

It's easy to make something reddit likes: start by trying to generate non-advertising content and see if you can get that to float, then move on to advertising.

No one here talks about the general content Reddit likes, because people in this thread don't seem to care. The fact that I had to spell out that "good" means "in the context of Reddit", i.e. "something Reddit likes" rather than some objective artistic assessment of what's good already shows what I'm talking about.

Basically, if I wanted to advertise on Reddit I would start by trying to integrate myself in that community.

Same as HackerNews. If I wanted to advertise here I wouldn't question the prevailing wisdom here - I'd regurgitate it and say obvious things to get modded up.

It's not about "lowest common denominator" - it's about respecting people as people rather than as a captive eyeball.

Likewise if I were making youtube pre-clip advertisements the #1 metric I would care about isn't conversions: it's, "can I be good enough and on the same frequency as my audience that they see I respect them enough for them to continue to watch?"

The Dove advertisements are a good example of advertising done right.

It's not "objectively good" - objectively, it's very, very bad. The before/after pictures don't ressemble each other because they were detailed precisely enough: noody mentions "and her hair is 7 inches long with a part forty-five degrees to the right, and she's smiling" whereas the other one is ""and her hair is 7 inches long with a part forty-five degrees to the right, and she's sad".

But that's exactly what the pictures show. So, objectively it's terrible. It's faked. But in the context we're talking about, it's very, very good. I saw tons of articles written about it, because it's simply that good.

On the other hand, the satire that I play in my head for that clip - where the women's own descriptions result in the guy drawing one giant circle with a downturned sad-face, and the descriptions by those who have met the person result in one giant circle with an upturned happy-face - that is in my opinion an awesome caricature of the Dove sketch artist campaign.

But in the context we're talking about it wouldn't be veyr good.

> 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).

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).

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

> 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.

Some reddit topics/threads were featured on the frontpage of popular German news websites during the last months. (Spiegel Online, Yahoo News, Süddeutsche)

I've seen BBC articles referencing Reddit (and even Hacker News !! ).

> and I wish they had a way to do some sort of sponsorship

They do, just ask. :) You can get an "ad" that shows up on the side that says "this reddit sponsored by foo", or myriad other options. Just hit them up and they will work with you.

In reddit you dont advertise your general offering, but make a special offer for them. Specially engineered to create a positive response. Due to how each sub reddit is a world in itself. I market a lot on reddit and it is simply the best social like place to market rightnow.

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.

Out of curiosity, which subreddit was this? I mainly go to r/bicycling and I think a good natured ad in that subforum would be received quite positively for both small companies making a niche product or big name brands.

I've had a similar experience. If you advertise to the Reddit (without specifying a subreddit), or one of the default subreddits, then expect to get a lot of flak in the comments unless you're advertising something that jives very well with Reddit's attitude on business "ethics". Most of the committed advertisers will also astroturf a couple of positive comments on different accounts to try to set the 'mood' for a comments page on their ad. Your mileage may vary with that, depends on how conspicuous/overt the comments are.

Spot on on all counts.

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.

It honestly seems like it would be more effective to pay to astroturf reddit than to buy legitimate advertisements.

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.

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.slideshare.net/MikeCole1/reddit-secret-planforwor...

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.

At least personally, I react more negatively towards "manipulation" or "subliminal ads" more than outright, in your face ads (especially if done humorously or in good taste), so this "take over a subreddit" may be effective even towards the skeptics and naysayers.

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.

I'm a mod of /r/business, and we had an American Express takeover. It was much more than just two block ads. Full banner, etc. Didn't last that long and our users really didn't seem to mind (or notice.)

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.

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.

"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).

I don't think you could actually change the layout, you would have to be moderator of that subreddit to do it

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.

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.

What makes it a poor offering?

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

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!

And a better interface with enhanced reporting ability. Hoping for something like AdWords, ended up with amateur-hour.

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

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.

That's a terrible business model. You can't charge people for targeting options

It is a bit baffling why Reddit's ad buying tools are so primitive. I assume the thinking is that if they shipped a proper ad dashboard that let advertisers target ads the way they want to, there'd be backlash from the community.

For me, you absolutely must have location targeting. Combined with a subreddit suggestion tool, and the ability to actually choose my own budget/pay per click or per impression, I'd be able to take reddit ads seriously. Right now, I'd only do reddit ads to promote content, or for laughs.

A response below highlighted some of the key reasons. Extremely limited options, poor interface (I was hoping for something closer to AdWords) and terrible reporting ability. Really missing some 'basics' that turn me off. Plus the few trials I've run generated a very high cost-per-click that wasn't generating an ROI.

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.

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

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.

Large brand advertisers care a lot about the type of content their advertising will be shown against. For example, it's pretty unlikely that prestige brands like Clinique and Mercedes-Benz, or family-friendly brands like Clorox and Disney will be advertising on Reddit. Brands also care about what TV shows their ads are shown with, so even if the demo fits, the content needs to match, too.

UGC is risky for brands because the content can be very NSFW or generally distateful. Sometimes outright hostile to brands. Reddit knows this, and has no pretense about it. So they're simply playing to their strengths. Some brands will embrace their unique audience, and some won't.

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.

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

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.

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

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

For now, yes. This is because outside of those countries the way you purchase an ad on reddit could be considered gambling. Once they switch to a pageview based system you'll be able to buy ads from lots of countries.

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.

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

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.

Thanks! I frequent r/bicycling which has 80k+ subscribers, so it's good to know I have a feel for what the environment of a "popular" subreddit is like with respect to # of submissions, comments, etc.

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

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

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.

>> 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...

The curious thing is that once a subreddit -does- get popular - that is, it hits 100K subscribers or so - you generally don't want to subscribe to it anymore. If it was specialised or niche, it becomes general; if it was highly moderated, the moderators will be struggling to keep the quality it once had; if it felt personal and intimate, it's now, well... not.

Totally depends on what you're marketing. For example, if you're marketing to a city. You don't need 50,000 subscribers.

For example, I get calls from all the social scene of Lyon (France) because I own a page with only 4k fans (+ a website). Only students. And that's enough already to advertise.

Popular relative to the overall size of Reddit, by that measure almost none of the subreddits are very big. They should have a bunch of subreddits with 1+ million subscribers given the size of the site.

They should encourage people to create accounts and subscribe to things they're interested in. It makes the site 100x more interesting, and yet most users just lurk or refresh the front page.

> They should have a bunch of subreddits with 1+ million subscribers given the size of the site.

Not really. What about the 90/10 rule?

Do you mean the 80/20 rule?

Something like that! Well you get the idea.

It's similar, yes. Here's the Wikipedia article: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)

The oft-discussed problem is simply that of "discovery".

Take me. Like everyone, I have interests that the greater community of reddit does not necessarily share, but given its size there are guaranteed to be subreddits that would cater to my niche interests. How do I find them?

Well, you can search for reddits, but it's not very discoverable. I had to intentionally visit an invalid subreddit to find the link! Then key in your interests, your school/work, where you live etc...

http://www.reddit.com/subreddits/search?q=sdsdffgfgfg

From there, you'll quickly encounter other subreddits in comments (e.g. 'this should be in /r/penmanshipporn' or 'cross-post from /r/imaginarylandscapes') and in the sidebars and FAQs. Or friends might recommend them - that's how I found /r/cringepics and /r/TIFU.

Over time you curate a list of high-content subreddits and trim out the fat like /r/funny and /r/atheism (pretty much any defeault subreddit, not making a point with my examples). And suddenly reddit becomes useable and doesn't have 1,000 new posts a day!

Finally, you'll find that whenever you get a new interest, you'll look for a subreddit for it - and it's often a very useful resource. For example, /r/LearnJapanese has been amazing for me.

I would LOVE to see reddit offer a Pinterest style signup where it asks a few basic questions to figure out what communities you'd be specifically interested in, as well as saying something like "and by all means, search for your specific interests by name, odds are pretty good there's a subreddit for that"

There is so much anti-information in your post. There are a huge number of non-default subreddit who are very popular. r/bitcoins r/minecraft r/eve r/seduction even cities subreddit like r/newyork etc...

Check this list here : http://stattit.com/subreddits/

I'm engaging in a LOT of small subreddit and I wouldn't call most of those inadequate for serious advertising.

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?

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

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".

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.

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

I don't think this is the case. A large number of reddit users either use reddit enhancement suite or hover zoom, both if which allow you to view images without leaving the page. Also comments are a huge part of reddit which all takes place on the site.

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

Where did you get that? It says on the slide that the average time is 20 minutes.

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.

> 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. :)

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

"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.

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

I quite like it for that reason

In the post Old Spice Man world, plenty of major brands have embraced silly internet dadaism in aspects of their marketing.

Think of it this way, the advertisers that can't deal with kittens with lightning out of their eyes in the pitch deck are also likely the ones that would have a bad experience advertising on reddit and interacting with the community. By being authentic in the pitch deck, they deter clients that should be deterred, and attract clients they want to attract. Being authentic is a better, more efficient strategy.

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?

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

$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?

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).

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.

Astroturfing makes you end up on /r/HailCorporate.

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

Yes. Chrome on iOS

Yeah but still ignoring international customers.

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

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

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

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.

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