Hacker News Reader

Comment by jcampbell1 | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

> 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 !! ).

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

> 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com