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Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

Also, let me point out that advertising on reddit is a royal pain in the ass. They have all kinds of broken processes and weird quirks that have not been fixed since we started trying to advertise there in 2011.

We recently went back to try some new campaigns there and none of it was fixed.

I'm sure if you're doing big media buys (ie., you're microsoft) they will just do it all for you, but from the standpoint of the self-serve advertising, it's really, really broken and difficult.

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My previous company came to reddit with an ad buy with a floor of ~5k/mo and a budgetary ceiling nearing $10k/mo if we saw better then expected numbers. The strategy was to target city specific sub-reddits with contextual ads. I went ahead and utilized PRAW and US Census data and brought that together with our internal data to target the top 300 cities for us. After doing all the legwork and presenting the reddit advertising execs with resources I put together we were told they couldn't scale to that level, and to instead look at targeting 3/4 cities with the same ad. This is probably the biggest road block I see for reddit trying to monetize at a level that Conde Nast was thinking when they "acquired" the company.

New PM on ads here. Completely agree and it's one of my top priorities to fix. Feel free to ping me directly if you ever want to give me more detailed feedback - ryan@reddit.com

Hey Ryan,

I didn't see your comment before I posted, but definitely take a gander at my previous comment for a good place to start.

Good luck!

I'm not sure what scale you are operating at but for me the guy trying to test an MVP the self serve ads were great. I picked:

An ad spend ($5)

My Target subreddit

When it runs

And then a few days later my ad was live.

For $5 it was ridiculously simple and easy.

Can you elaborate on what you were looking for?

This. I've been back multiple times over the years to run some small campaigns for some big startups there and can't believe how bad and rough around edges their tools and processes are.

If I didn't love reddit so much there is no way I would've put up with them to run a small campaign.

Not being able to use redirects = non-starter. The first thing you learn when you work in the advertising industry is not to trust other people's metrics.

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