Reddit Promises Post Sponsors a 'Walled Garden' of Conversation (cnbc.com)

"Reddit has been actively luring advertisers as it attempts to take advantage of its vast audience to build its business," reports CNBC, adding that Reddit "has indicated it wants to increase advertising across the site, including more display and mobile ads and sponsored opportunities." An anonymous reader quotes their report: The 13-year-old company is now trying to expand and is making an aggressive push to get advertisers on board... [R]epresentatives from a half-dozen ad agencies told CNBC they've been pitched by Reddit within the past year about the company's plans to help brands target users. CNBC also obtained a 28-page presentation that Reddit has been sharing with advertisers...

Reddit is taking proactive steps to help clients protect their brands. In addition to its system of volunteer moderators and upvoting as a way to police content, three agencies that spoke with CNBC about Reddit said the company has discussed investing in technology like natural language bots to find questionable posts and hiring more people to monitor the threads. Reddit's ad deck has a section dedicated to "brand safety," where it explains how it places advertiser content in "white-listed" categories that are safe and has a team that watches over it. "Our dedicated account team constantly monitors Your Reddit Ad to ensure engagement is relevant and positive -- creating a 'walled garden' of conversation you can moderate or ban as needed," the slide says.
The artilce points out that Reddit is the third most-trafficked site in the U.S., but has far less ad revenue than other tech giants.

• Google: $95 billion in 2018
• Facebook: $40 billion
• Amazon: $2 billion (from advertising) in the last three months
• Twitter: $655 million in the first three months of 2018
• Reddit: Over $100 million projected for 2018

Comments

Growth?

[lucasnate1]

We keep hearing about how "economic growth" is a good thing. And yet, in practice, it seems that when a service gets "economic growth" (cable TV is a good example), it becomes shittier. Yet, we cling to "economic growth" like priests in a church.

How about doing it right?

[cirby]

If you want to include ads, put them directly in the code. Keep them simple. No autoplay on videos. No sudden sound playback. Don't link out to external sites, that's why so much advertising gets screwed up, and causes slow page load times as a minimum issue.

Don't "protect" your sponsors. If you have to do that, you probably don't want them in the first place. Put the ad up, supply a link to their site, and be done with it.

Other companies have done what reddit is planning on doing. You know... Yahoo!, MySpace, Facebook...

I don't see ads on any sites

[C18H27NO3]

so knock yourself out, Reddit.

Obsessed With Disguising It as Content

[Kunedog]

I wrote about this three years ago during AMAgeddon under Chairman Pao, so Reddit has been behaving this way and trying to push "safe spaces" like this for a long time:

https://news.slashdot.org/comm...

[Marketers] want to buy their way in, but not if some dirty peasant can tell the truth and (through sheer merit) get voted up and be taken just as seriously (or more seriously) than their bought & paid for message.

So Reddit sees advertisers chomping at the bit to throw money at it, but first Reddit has to demonstrate that it can crush contrary opinions at will.

Those normal ads you speak of aren't good enough for Reddit's leadership. They clearly believe there is enormous value to leveraging synergies^W^W . . er . . I mean, disguising their ads (if only at first glance) as posts by normal users, and they appear completely blind to the damage this does to their user experience. I see a couple possibilities:

(1) They really believe enough users will be entirely fooled and "engage with the brand" to offset the users who are pissed off and (eventually) never fooled again.

(2) They're aware of how it pisses users off and only care about convincing advertisers of (1).