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Comment by zipop | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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