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On a visitor perspective, this seems undervalued. This is a 50% or more discount to the market-cap/unique visitor ratio of Twitter, Snap, and Facebook.[1] And a

On a visitor perspective, this seems undervalued. This is a 50% or more discount to the market-cap/unique visitor ratio of Twitter, Snap, and Facebook.[1] And all the stats I've seen indicate much higher user engagement and time on site for Reddit compared to the other social platforms. The biggest issue is of course that their monetization is horrible. Like 95% lower per user than the other socials.[2] So the real question an investor should ask is whether this is fixable? Or is there something intrinsic to Reddit traffic that makes it difficult to monetize? Either way, Reddit should be throwing an insane amount of money and equity to get a Sheryl Sandberg like executive with a track record of juicing monetization. [1]https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/1/21754984/reddit-dau-daily-users-revealed https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/1/21754984/reddit-dau-daily... [2]https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/reddit-users-are-the-least-valuable-of-any-social-network.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/reddit-users-are-the-least-v...

paxys 5y ago
There is a LOT standing in the way of monetization for Reddit: - younger user base (so less disposable income) - loose concept of user identity, so can't tailor ads - more corpoarate and mainstream advertisers tend to stay away due to the nature of the community and content shared - primary usage is on web rather than mobile apps All of these are fixable, but the question is can they do so without alienating their use base.
- math-dev 5y ago
  I agree with most of what you say, but I thought most of the usage was now on the mobile app? By most, I mean the vast majority (hence my perplexion and need to comment and confirm my understanding)
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  Can't tailor ads? Loose concept of user identity? I would think having a list of every subreddit a user subscribes to would give you a good indication of what interests they have! But from reading this thread it sounds like Reddit makes it difficult to choose which subreddits you want to advertise to.
  - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
    Don't forget the invasive data mining they get from the app and location tracking.
thefounder 5y ago
If you use digg as reference the long term outlook of reddit is not that bright.
- ruined 5y ago
  digg died fifteen years ago. clearly a lot has changed, and the mistakes that killed digg have not been made. and i think reddit is beyond the point at which a digg-style fuckup could kill them. at worst you might see cadres of ideological users depart for something like lemmy, which is already happening to an extent, but there is a lot of space to flee internally, so most users don't feel the pressure. and diffusion to federated media is in the future for every mass audience. reddit has such a huge and active userbase it will dominate for the foreseeable future.
  - lovich 5y ago
    whats lemmy? Googling around all I found was articles about the motorhead singer and some weird dead forum from the 2000s about lemmy koopa
    - Buttons840 5y ago
      Probably https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy
      - lovich 5y ago
        wow is this small https://join-lemmy.org/instances https://join-lemmy.org/instances
  - Shorel 5y ago
    The new HTML layout and the obnoxious mobile website are worse than what killed Digg, IMO. The difference is that when Digg made their mistakes, Reddit was there for the taking. Nowadays, there's no alternative to Reddit. All the new sites appear to be focused on hateful communities banned from Reddit, and that will never attract the mainstream.
jdavis703 5y ago
Those publicly traded social media sites are valued at that rate by the public. It’s possible that VC’s are: 1) Valuing the company in the hopes of making a profit on the IPO 2) More conservative than public markets
CodesInChaos 5y ago
Reddit is increasingly forcing mobile users into the app, or to at least make an account. Presumably to improve monetization.
- Scoundreller 5y ago
  And tracking/notifications. Which is of course why I don’t install it.
  - CodesInChaos 5y ago
    Tracking and driving engagement via notifications are some of the most important reasons why app users can be monetized better than anonymous web users (user sees more ads if they're spending more time, and tracking allows better targeted and thus higher paying ads)
    - kjax 5y ago
      There's another big factor with mobile app users: it's much harder to block ads in a mobile app.
      - CodesInChaos 5y ago
        Don't most users already use mobile browsers (e.g. chrome) which don't support extensions and thus ad blockers?
        Scoundreller 5y ago
        Firefox on iOS supports strict ad blocking. It’s not as good as some of the purpose-built extensions on desktop, but it mostly does the job.
- mateo411 5y ago
  It's easier to track in the app because of the mobile advertising identifier.
Allower 5y ago
And then you would see a mass exodus of users..
- techrat 5y ago
  I'd argue that the majority of the users that made the site worth using have already left.
  - trophycase 5y ago
    As someone who left the site a year/year and a half ago. I agree ;)
dougSF70 5y ago
Perhaps traffic has a reciprocal relationship with monetization and until Reddits management are ready to bite the bullet there is a tendency to focus on vanity metrics such as traffic rather than $.
thisisnico 5y ago
I feel like extraordinary monetization of reddit would ruin reddit, and the reason why people actually like reddit.
- BeFlatXIII 5y ago
  If they do ruin Reddit with monetization, I hope it also ruins a few people's investment portfolios along the way.
- Blikkentrekker 5y ago
  It's already happening with the profile pages being implemented. I liked it around 2008 because it did not have profile pages and a fairly simple, straightforward interface and did not attempt to couple one's real life identity to one's post and encouraged throwaway accounts by allowing users to sign up without providing an email address. Much of that is changing, and I also find that websites that encourage a link with one's real life identity tend to have an ever more annoying culture. It also feels like more excessive Americana as time goes on. It did not seem like idiosyncractic U.S.A. social issues were as common in 2008, as well as the typical user that assumes every other user is from the U.S.A..
- allochthon 5y ago
  Reddit is one of the sites I use the most. I hope they can figure out a financially sustainable model without becoming obnoxious or, eventually, being bought up by a private equity firm.
  - le-mark 5y ago
    This already happened, Condé Nast bought and then spun off reddit when they failed to monetize it. Reddit has to thread a needle to monetize and not kill its user base. I wager it’s impossible.
nickthemagicman 5y ago
User Engagement is inversely correlated to monetization.
- PEJOE 5y ago
  Can you please provide more evidence to support this claim? From where I'm sitting, TikTok's and Instagram's businesses would disagree strongly.
  - nickthemagicman 5y ago
    That wasn't a scientific statement. Just a theory about Reddit. I personally like Reddit because it's not shoving ad's in your face constantly and I think others do as well. Apologies for presenting it without labelling it as a theory. I would edit it now if I could.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    I would say, given a static audience of 1 million people, that user engagement goes down the more you advertise (if 1/4 of my feed is ads, that's 25% less actual content to interact with). TikTok and Instagram have been able to grow larger and larger audiences despite the pressure of ads (and honestly I know when I tried TikTok last there weren't any ads yet, I wonder what portion of an hour is taken up by ads and how long is it til it reaches television levels of ~25%) - as long as audience growth outpaces users losing interest, you can keep introducing ads, but you can't do it forever.
ren_engineer 5y ago
Reddit userbase is way more hostile to ads on average, more block ads, a lot of the content is non-advertiser friendly, they have less information on their audience for targeting, etc. Reddit is more forum than social network, they'll need to get creative to make more revenue from users. Winning strategy for them might be to try and get more older users who don't care about ads so much and have lots of money
- gruez 5y ago
  >Winning strategy for them might be to try and get more older users who don't care about ads so much and have lots of money Isn't the most sought-after demographic 18-35 because they have the most disposable income? Afterwards disposable income drops off because of kids and/or retirement.
  - wil421 5y ago
    Not by a long shot. Boomers are still the highest in spending[1]. I was a broke college student forever and somewhat broke for the years or so after (no loans I worked through college). I’m in the 30-40 range with kids and I spend much more than my twenties. Lots of college students are spending their parents money for these kinds of things. [1] https://resources.datadrivenmarketing.equifax.com/dyks-equifax-ddm/discretionary-spending-by-age-tier https://resources.datadrivenmarketing.equifax.com/dyks-equif...
    - nradov 5y ago
      While older consumers do have more money to spend, most advertisers prefer to target younger consumers. The thinking is that boomers already have established brand preferences and spending patterns so it's much harder to convert them into new customers.
      - xkjkls 5y ago
        This is only really true for television advertising, since most of it is brand building, instead of "click here and buy now" online.
michaelbuckbee 5y ago
You asked if there was "something intrinsic to Reddit traffic that makes it difficult to monetize?" and the answer is: Yes, they're far less invasive than the other platforms you mentioned. Just at a very high level: - no offsite tracking (so no retargeting - the follow you around the internet ads) - no separate ad network (you can't buy ads on Reddit that show up on 3rd party sites) - limits on how granular targeting can be (it's by sub-reddit but they exclude many based on size+sensitivity) - no demographic targeting (you can't pitch your product to males 18-35) - no fine grained geographic targeting (lowest they go is major metro areas of millions of people)
- subpixel 5y ago
  This seems likely to change.
- underwater 5y ago
  And now they're taking huge amounts of money, which means they need to succeed as an advertising company, which means they'll start doing many of those things.
- techrat 5y ago
  Reddit has had off site tracking for quite some time. Remember those little snooheads where you could 'reblog' about something? or vote on a site while on it? Seeing the reddit bugs/icons/badges was about when the site started engaging in data collection. You bet your ass they do everything they can to determine a general profile of each user now based on visited subs and patterns.
  - chatfat 5y ago
    They cannot manage a little chat widget on their website, you think they'll be able to trackbusers? You're right that they are trying but they are definitely not capable.
Cipater 5y ago
>Either way, Reddit should be throwing an insane amount of money and equity to get a Sheryl Sandberg like executive with a track record of juicing monetization. You mean that they should spend as much money as they can on ruining Reddit.
saisundar 5y ago
Reddit currently supports many third party freemium clients ( Ala Twitter 2012). These third party apps offer a no ad experience too. Unsure how much revenue reddit shares with these apps though. It helps with growth(more options for users to be on reddit) , but definitely hurts ad inventory, ad targeting insights etc.
- brianwawok 5y ago
  They will eventually shut these down to increase ad views, just like twitter
- snuxoll 5y ago
  I think this is likely why Reddit has heavily pushed direct revenue with an expansion of awards available (cheapest ones are 50 coins now), in addition to the continued ad-free option with a premium subscription.
- SaltySolomon 5y ago
  Thats less than 0.5% of traffic tho, most of it is from the official apps nowerdays.
- sharatvir 5y ago
  I love Apollo on iOS. Without that I’d primarily just browse Reddit on desktop web. The official mobile app and mobile web is actually a disaster.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
dilap 5y ago
And of course the site will just get worse and worse, but continue onward, because its value is in the audience, and it takes a lot to screw up that momentum. (What a blessing that HN isn't run to make a profit.)
paulpauper 5y ago
I don't think Reddit will ever scale as well as something like Facebook . The bigger Reddit gets, the less usable it becomes due to subs becoming too crowded.
- setr 5y ago
  The whole point of reddit is that the crowding issue is self-correcting -- you just move to a new sub. I like to envision it as a malthusian catastrophe -- as the population starts reaching capacity limits, people start grumbling more and more.. until suddenly they far overshoot the capacity, and leave en-masse to new subs. In one fell swoop, the original sub is left near-empty, and out of the many new subs created in that instant, a few survive with healthy populations.
  - paulpauper 5y ago
    I have been on reddit a long time and I have never seen a popular sub ever die unless it gets banned by admins. Splinter subs emerge but the original one remains popular too
    - 2c2c2c 5y ago
      SRS, breadtube
- spfzero 5y ago
  The long-tail subs will never get too crowded. If you have found a niche where like-minded people hang out, there will never be a whole lot more of them, and however many more there are, it's a positive. I'm thinking vintageaudio, lv426, subs like that.
heywintermute 5y ago
>Or is there something intrinsic to Reddit traffic that makes it difficult to monetize? Reddit is also home to an enormous amount of porn and nsfw content in general which probably hurts this. They only just started preventing sexually explicit subreddits/content from appearing on r/all six months ago[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/lhnvok/removing_sexually_explicit_content_from_rall/ https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/lhnvok/removing_...
- f6v 5y ago
  It’s not going to be Tumblr all over again if they choose to ban it. But I wonder how many people use Reddit just for nsfw.
  - NationalPark 5y ago
    I wonder if their problem is that the majority of their traffic is unregistered users looking at NSFW subreddits. So they may not actually have that many users they could monetize in the first place.
    - michannne 5y ago
      Simple fix: allow users to save video only if logged in (could prime with a CTA). Right now you cant save any video from reddit, not just nsfw, not even from the app. This would incentivize people to create an account since its easier and less shady than content grabbing sites. If they want they can even limit to the app which would at least have an impact on boosting app users
      - mike_d 5y ago
        Reply to a video with a comment mentioning u/savevideo and you'll get a response in a few minutes with a link. I think Reddit Enhancement Suite might also have an option for adding a download link. As for an official paid feature: as soon as they start collecting money for video related features, the video creators will start circling for their cut of the revenue.
mdoms 5y ago
I suspect (without proof) that Reddit's unique user count is far smaller than its actual user count. People proudly use multiple alts and such behaviour is tacitly encouraged by the platform. It's not at all unusual for a user to have alts for gaming, porn and other things. Obvious this phenomenon exists on other platforms but my gut tells me it's far more prevalent on Reddit.
initplus 5y ago
One thing that they do not seem to be taking advantage of is how specialized many of their communities are. It seems primed for letting advertisers target to specific audiences, but as a user I don't really feel like the ads I get are targeted to what I read at all? Maybe I am uninformed but it seems like an advertising goldmine that hasn't been taken advantage of. If you are a PC components retailer, users of /r/buildapc seems like an ideal audience to target for advertising. Camera retailer, where better than /r/photography? Cookware - advertise in /r/cooking. Repeat ad infinitum across every niche interest on the site. They should be able to enable advertisers to do really effective targeting of campaigns. Is this not possible with their current ad tools, or are they not selling the capabilities to advertisers well enough? Or is there not actually that much money in targeted ads, is all the money in generic ads like Coca-Cola & cars?
- wintermutestwin 5y ago
  Sounds like a great way to prod those specialized communities to bail to the next diggredditetc. People are going to those specialized communities to get real information from real users, not lies and misinformation (ads and marketing).
  - warning26 5y ago
    Eh, I'd say most of the hardcore Reddit users have both old.reddit as well as an Ad Blocker, so I'm guessing that slightly better ad configuration tools wouldn't adversely impact the longtime users too much. As for other users, they are already seeing incredibly random and irrelevant ads. Seeing actual photography themed ads on a photography themed forum doesn't seem that bad IMO (provided that they are clearly marked as ads, of course.)
    - spookthesunset 5y ago
      Naw. The new Reddit design is much nicer than the old. There, I said it. It is much easier to use. It took them a while to iron out the bugs but it is way better. Now their new mobile app video player… ho boy…..
edoceo 5y ago
> higher user engagement It's the dark patterns and having to reload pages multiple times to finally see the content. > and time on site Again, break your site so addicts have to try harder to get their dopamine hit The reddit "engagement" numbers are false.
- TchoBeer 5y ago
  If I'm wrong GP can correct me, but I think "engagement" means commenting/posting/voting, just viewing a page doesn't count as engagement.
  - edoceo 5y ago
    View page: Something went wrong, refresh, refresh, scrolls, clicks load more, scroll, upvote. Results: longer time and the user will now actually engage, because they had to "work" to get there. Complete dark-pattern to "juke the stats". And it's too complicated for their stupid investors to understand why the numbers are bullshit.
    - TchoBeer 5y ago
      Do you have any data to suggest that a more frustrating viewing experience boosts engagement? Intuitively it should do the opposite.
      - edoceo 5y ago
        The thing is, which works against intuition, is that when an addict works a little more for the hit, they "deserve" it more. Most of the data I have is about heroin and cocaine. And folks are very reluctant to like physically addictive things to these technologic addiction things. But human nature is very consistent regarding these dopamine releases. We're all fienders.
      - jazzyjackson 5y ago
        It's "slot machine" psychology, sometimes it doesn't work so you have to pull it again. Being unpredictable makes the dopamine rush stronger when it works and gives you what you want. search for "slot machine social media" and you'll find a good deal of coverage. This usually applies to what posts are in an algorithmic feed, but I guess not having the feed show up at all is a fresh innovation. Twitter and Reddit both do a lot of just giving up and saying "woops, couldn't load that link you just clicked" as if that was a real problem. Really? what, the database wasn't there when you looked? Try again yourself, why make me click refresh? Another anecdata - search on facebook doesn't work for finding stuff in someone's timeline, so I've spent many minutes scrolling down someone's page trying to find a post. It's frustrating but I don't quit, and I'm sure metrics and impressions look great (no click through tho)
TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
Your comments make perfect sense in light of the fact that Reddit is the world's largest free porn site, with just enough "social" sprinkled on top to keep you engaged between wanks.
- slugiscool99 5y ago
  The only information I could find claims that about 22% of reddit is NSFW. They calculated the percentage of NSFW subreddits with >100k subscribers. [1] That's far from a perfect way to measure this, but it's around the statistic that 30% of the internet is porn. My intuition tells me Reddit probably reflects the internet as a whole pretty well. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/f94j0y/oc_how_much_of_reddit_is_pornographic/?sort=confidence https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/f94j0y/oc_...
  - TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
    Well, just for the record, that doesn't invalidate what I said. I'm not concerned with what PERCENTAGE is porn. It still is the largest, most-easily-accessible, most searchable, free porn site. And also for the record, yes, I HATE that Reddit (and Twitter, et. al.) allow full-on NSFW content along with all the rest.
  - listenallyall 5y ago
    Doesn't matter the percentage of subreddits (i.e. counting every qualifying subreddit equally), what is the percentage of eyeballs? And don't you think lots of people view porn subreddits without subscribing?
ska 5y ago
> And all the stats I've seen indicate much higher user engagement and time on site for Reddit compared to the other social platforms. >The biggest issue is of course that their monetization is horrible. It's possible that these two things are pretty tightly linked.
mschuster91 5y ago
> This is a 50% or more discount to the market-cap/unique visitor ratio of Twitter, Snap, and Facebook.[1] And all the stats I've seen indicate much higher user engagement and time on site for Reddit compared to the other social platforms. Most people have one Snap / FB account and one, maximum two Twitter accounts... but throwaways are the norm on Reddit (as well as HN), which means Reddit's user count is inflated by quite a bit. Additionally, Reddit has large nsfw communities that draw lots of members and visitors (again, most with separate accounts!), and these can't be reasonably monetized at all.
Havoc 5y ago
> On a visitor perspective, this seems undervalued. Cause they’re always one drama away from losing tons of people. The platform seems to attract drama involving the platform and decisions made more than say Twitter does
pgayed 5y ago
> should be throwing an insane amount of money and equity to get a Sheryl Sandberg like executive This is correct but also bittersweet.
nl 5y ago
One of the main reasons their monetization is so bad is that their mobile app is terrible. Mobile Apps are important for monetization because they are much less vulnerable to ad blockers, people are used to ads taking up more of the screen in scrollable content and in most cases carry more traffic than desktop versions. I think the disastrous experience buying and targeting ads is bad too, but the lack of a decent mobile app is a huge factor.
ButtSpark69 5y ago
As a reddit user, this sounds exactly like you're trying to drive me away from the site.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

paxys 5y ago

There is a LOT standing in the way of monetization for Reddit: - younger user base (so less disposable income) - loose concept of user identity, so can't tailor ads - more corpoarate and mainstream advertisers tend to stay away due to the nature of the community and content shared - primary usage is on web rather than mobile apps All of these are fixable, but the question is can they do so without alienating their use base.

math-dev 5y ago
I agree with most of what you say, but I thought most of the usage was now on the mobile app? By most, I mean the vast majority (hence my perplexion and need to comment and confirm my understanding)
jazzyjackson 5y ago
Can't tailor ads? Loose concept of user identity? I would think having a list of every subreddit a user subscribes to would give you a good indication of what interests they have! But from reading this thread it sounds like Reddit makes it difficult to choose which subreddits you want to advertise to.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  Don't forget the invasive data mining they get from the app and location tracking.

thefounder 5y ago

If you use digg as reference the long term outlook of reddit is not that bright.

ruined 5y ago
digg died fifteen years ago. clearly a lot has changed, and the mistakes that killed digg have not been made. and i think reddit is beyond the point at which a digg-style fuckup could kill them. at worst you might see cadres of ideological users depart for something like lemmy, which is already happening to an extent, but there is a lot of space to flee internally, so most users don't feel the pressure. and diffusion to federated media is in the future for every mass audience. reddit has such a huge and active userbase it will dominate for the foreseeable future.
- lovich 5y ago
  whats lemmy? Googling around all I found was articles about the motorhead singer and some weird dead forum from the 2000s about lemmy koopa
  - Buttons840 5y ago
    Probably https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy
    - lovich 5y ago
      wow is this small https://join-lemmy.org/instances https://join-lemmy.org/instances
- Shorel 5y ago
  The new HTML layout and the obnoxious mobile website are worse than what killed Digg, IMO. The difference is that when Digg made their mistakes, Reddit was there for the taking. Nowadays, there's no alternative to Reddit. All the new sites appear to be focused on hateful communities banned from Reddit, and that will never attract the mainstream.

jdavis703 5y ago

Those publicly traded social media sites are valued at that rate by the public. It’s possible that VC’s are: 1) Valuing the company in the hopes of making a profit on the IPO 2) More conservative than public markets

CodesInChaos 5y ago

Reddit is increasingly forcing mobile users into the app, or to at least make an account. Presumably to improve monetization.

Scoundreller 5y ago
And tracking/notifications. Which is of course why I don’t install it.
- CodesInChaos 5y ago
  Tracking and driving engagement via notifications are some of the most important reasons why app users can be monetized better than anonymous web users (user sees more ads if they're spending more time, and tracking allows better targeted and thus higher paying ads)
  - kjax 5y ago
    There's another big factor with mobile app users: it's much harder to block ads in a mobile app.
    - CodesInChaos 5y ago
      Don't most users already use mobile browsers (e.g. chrome) which don't support extensions and thus ad blockers?
      - Scoundreller 5y ago
        Firefox on iOS supports strict ad blocking. It’s not as good as some of the purpose-built extensions on desktop, but it mostly does the job.
mateo411 5y ago
It's easier to track in the app because of the mobile advertising identifier.

Allower 5y ago

And then you would see a mass exodus of users..

techrat 5y ago
I'd argue that the majority of the users that made the site worth using have already left.
- trophycase 5y ago
  As someone who left the site a year/year and a half ago. I agree ;)

dougSF70 5y ago

Perhaps traffic has a reciprocal relationship with monetization and until Reddits management are ready to bite the bullet there is a tendency to focus on vanity metrics such as traffic rather than $.

thisisnico 5y ago

I feel like extraordinary monetization of reddit would ruin reddit, and the reason why people actually like reddit.

BeFlatXIII 5y ago
If they do ruin Reddit with monetization, I hope it also ruins a few people's investment portfolios along the way.
Blikkentrekker 5y ago
It's already happening with the profile pages being implemented. I liked it around 2008 because it did not have profile pages and a fairly simple, straightforward interface and did not attempt to couple one's real life identity to one's post and encouraged throwaway accounts by allowing users to sign up without providing an email address. Much of that is changing, and I also find that websites that encourage a link with one's real life identity tend to have an ever more annoying culture. It also feels like more excessive Americana as time goes on. It did not seem like idiosyncractic U.S.A. social issues were as common in 2008, as well as the typical user that assumes every other user is from the U.S.A..
allochthon 5y ago
Reddit is one of the sites I use the most. I hope they can figure out a financially sustainable model without becoming obnoxious or, eventually, being bought up by a private equity firm.
- le-mark 5y ago
  This already happened, Condé Nast bought and then spun off reddit when they failed to monetize it. Reddit has to thread a needle to monetize and not kill its user base. I wager it’s impossible.

nickthemagicman 5y ago

User Engagement is inversely correlated to monetization.

PEJOE 5y ago
Can you please provide more evidence to support this claim? From where I'm sitting, TikTok's and Instagram's businesses would disagree strongly.
- nickthemagicman 5y ago
  That wasn't a scientific statement. Just a theory about Reddit. I personally like Reddit because it's not shoving ad's in your face constantly and I think others do as well. Apologies for presenting it without labelling it as a theory. I would edit it now if I could.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  I would say, given a static audience of 1 million people, that user engagement goes down the more you advertise (if 1/4 of my feed is ads, that's 25% less actual content to interact with). TikTok and Instagram have been able to grow larger and larger audiences despite the pressure of ads (and honestly I know when I tried TikTok last there weren't any ads yet, I wonder what portion of an hour is taken up by ads and how long is it til it reaches television levels of ~25%) - as long as audience growth outpaces users losing interest, you can keep introducing ads, but you can't do it forever.

ren_engineer 5y ago

Reddit userbase is way more hostile to ads on average, more block ads, a lot of the content is non-advertiser friendly, they have less information on their audience for targeting, etc. Reddit is more forum than social network, they'll need to get creative to make more revenue from users. Winning strategy for them might be to try and get more older users who don't care about ads so much and have lots of money

gruez 5y ago
>Winning strategy for them might be to try and get more older users who don't care about ads so much and have lots of money Isn't the most sought-after demographic 18-35 because they have the most disposable income? Afterwards disposable income drops off because of kids and/or retirement.
- wil421 5y ago
  Not by a long shot. Boomers are still the highest in spending[1]. I was a broke college student forever and somewhat broke for the years or so after (no loans I worked through college). I’m in the 30-40 range with kids and I spend much more than my twenties. Lots of college students are spending their parents money for these kinds of things. [1] https://resources.datadrivenmarketing.equifax.com/dyks-equifax-ddm/discretionary-spending-by-age-tier https://resources.datadrivenmarketing.equifax.com/dyks-equif...
  - nradov 5y ago
    While older consumers do have more money to spend, most advertisers prefer to target younger consumers. The thinking is that boomers already have established brand preferences and spending patterns so it's much harder to convert them into new customers.
    - xkjkls 5y ago
      This is only really true for television advertising, since most of it is brand building, instead of "click here and buy now" online.

michaelbuckbee 5y ago

You asked if there was "something intrinsic to Reddit traffic that makes it difficult to monetize?" and the answer is: Yes, they're far less invasive than the other platforms you mentioned. Just at a very high level: - no offsite tracking (so no retargeting - the follow you around the internet ads) - no separate ad network (you can't buy ads on Reddit that show up on 3rd party sites) - limits on how granular targeting can be (it's by sub-reddit but they exclude many based on size+sensitivity) - no demographic targeting (you can't pitch your product to males 18-35) - no fine grained geographic targeting (lowest they go is major metro areas of millions of people)

subpixel 5y ago
This seems likely to change.
underwater 5y ago
And now they're taking huge amounts of money, which means they need to succeed as an advertising company, which means they'll start doing many of those things.
techrat 5y ago
Reddit has had off site tracking for quite some time. Remember those little snooheads where you could 'reblog' about something? or vote on a site while on it? Seeing the reddit bugs/icons/badges was about when the site started engaging in data collection. You bet your ass they do everything they can to determine a general profile of each user now based on visited subs and patterns.
- chatfat 5y ago
  They cannot manage a little chat widget on their website, you think they'll be able to trackbusers? You're right that they are trying but they are definitely not capable.

Cipater 5y ago

>Either way, Reddit should be throwing an insane amount of money and equity to get a Sheryl Sandberg like executive with a track record of juicing monetization. You mean that they should spend as much money as they can on ruining Reddit.

saisundar 5y ago

Reddit currently supports many third party freemium clients ( Ala Twitter 2012). These third party apps offer a no ad experience too. Unsure how much revenue reddit shares with these apps though. It helps with growth(more options for users to be on reddit) , but definitely hurts ad inventory, ad targeting insights etc.

brianwawok 5y ago
They will eventually shut these down to increase ad views, just like twitter
snuxoll 5y ago
I think this is likely why Reddit has heavily pushed direct revenue with an expansion of awards available (cheapest ones are 50 coins now), in addition to the continued ad-free option with a premium subscription.
SaltySolomon 5y ago
Thats less than 0.5% of traffic tho, most of it is from the official apps nowerdays.
sharatvir 5y ago
I love Apollo on iOS. Without that I’d primarily just browse Reddit on desktop web. The official mobile app and mobile web is actually a disaster.
deleted 5y ago
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dilap 5y ago

And of course the site will just get worse and worse, but continue onward, because its value is in the audience, and it takes a lot to screw up that momentum. (What a blessing that HN isn't run to make a profit.)

paulpauper 5y ago

I don't think Reddit will ever scale as well as something like Facebook . The bigger Reddit gets, the less usable it becomes due to subs becoming too crowded.

setr 5y ago
The whole point of reddit is that the crowding issue is self-correcting -- you just move to a new sub. I like to envision it as a malthusian catastrophe -- as the population starts reaching capacity limits, people start grumbling more and more.. until suddenly they far overshoot the capacity, and leave en-masse to new subs. In one fell swoop, the original sub is left near-empty, and out of the many new subs created in that instant, a few survive with healthy populations.
- paulpauper 5y ago
  I have been on reddit a long time and I have never seen a popular sub ever die unless it gets banned by admins. Splinter subs emerge but the original one remains popular too
  - 2c2c2c 5y ago
    SRS, breadtube
spfzero 5y ago
The long-tail subs will never get too crowded. If you have found a niche where like-minded people hang out, there will never be a whole lot more of them, and however many more there are, it's a positive. I'm thinking vintageaudio, lv426, subs like that.

heywintermute 5y ago

>Or is there something intrinsic to Reddit traffic that makes it difficult to monetize? Reddit is also home to an enormous amount of porn and nsfw content in general which probably hurts this. They only just started preventing sexually explicit subreddits/content from appearing on r/all six months ago[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/lhnvok/removing_sexually_explicit_content_from_rall/ https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/lhnvok/removing_...

f6v 5y ago
It’s not going to be Tumblr all over again if they choose to ban it. But I wonder how many people use Reddit just for nsfw.
- NationalPark 5y ago
  I wonder if their problem is that the majority of their traffic is unregistered users looking at NSFW subreddits. So they may not actually have that many users they could monetize in the first place.
  - michannne 5y ago
    Simple fix: allow users to save video only if logged in (could prime with a CTA). Right now you cant save any video from reddit, not just nsfw, not even from the app. This would incentivize people to create an account since its easier and less shady than content grabbing sites. If they want they can even limit to the app which would at least have an impact on boosting app users
    - mike_d 5y ago
      Reply to a video with a comment mentioning u/savevideo and you'll get a response in a few minutes with a link. I think Reddit Enhancement Suite might also have an option for adding a download link. As for an official paid feature: as soon as they start collecting money for video related features, the video creators will start circling for their cut of the revenue.

mdoms 5y ago

I suspect (without proof) that Reddit's unique user count is far smaller than its actual user count. People proudly use multiple alts and such behaviour is tacitly encouraged by the platform. It's not at all unusual for a user to have alts for gaming, porn and other things. Obvious this phenomenon exists on other platforms but my gut tells me it's far more prevalent on Reddit.

initplus 5y ago

One thing that they do not seem to be taking advantage of is how specialized many of their communities are. It seems primed for letting advertisers target to specific audiences, but as a user I don't really feel like the ads I get are targeted to what I read at all? Maybe I am uninformed but it seems like an advertising goldmine that hasn't been taken advantage of. If you are a PC components retailer, users of /r/buildapc seems like an ideal audience to target for advertising. Camera retailer, where better than /r/photography? Cookware - advertise in /r/cooking. Repeat ad infinitum across every niche interest on the site. They should be able to enable advertisers to do really effective targeting of campaigns. Is this not possible with their current ad tools, or are they not selling the capabilities to advertisers well enough? Or is there not actually that much money in targeted ads, is all the money in generic ads like Coca-Cola & cars?

wintermutestwin 5y ago
Sounds like a great way to prod those specialized communities to bail to the next diggredditetc. People are going to those specialized communities to get real information from real users, not lies and misinformation (ads and marketing).
- warning26 5y ago
  Eh, I'd say most of the hardcore Reddit users have both old.reddit as well as an Ad Blocker, so I'm guessing that slightly better ad configuration tools wouldn't adversely impact the longtime users too much. As for other users, they are already seeing incredibly random and irrelevant ads. Seeing actual photography themed ads on a photography themed forum doesn't seem that bad IMO (provided that they are clearly marked as ads, of course.)
  - spookthesunset 5y ago
    Naw. The new Reddit design is much nicer than the old. There, I said it. It is much easier to use. It took them a while to iron out the bugs but it is way better. Now their new mobile app video player… ho boy…..

edoceo 5y ago

> higher user engagement It's the dark patterns and having to reload pages multiple times to finally see the content. > and time on site Again, break your site so addicts have to try harder to get their dopamine hit The reddit "engagement" numbers are false.

TchoBeer 5y ago
If I'm wrong GP can correct me, but I think "engagement" means commenting/posting/voting, just viewing a page doesn't count as engagement.
- edoceo 5y ago
  View page: Something went wrong, refresh, refresh, scrolls, clicks load more, scroll, upvote. Results: longer time and the user will now actually engage, because they had to "work" to get there. Complete dark-pattern to "juke the stats". And it's too complicated for their stupid investors to understand why the numbers are bullshit.
  - TchoBeer 5y ago
    Do you have any data to suggest that a more frustrating viewing experience boosts engagement? Intuitively it should do the opposite.
    - edoceo 5y ago
      The thing is, which works against intuition, is that when an addict works a little more for the hit, they "deserve" it more. Most of the data I have is about heroin and cocaine. And folks are very reluctant to like physically addictive things to these technologic addiction things. But human nature is very consistent regarding these dopamine releases. We're all fienders.
    - jazzyjackson 5y ago
      It's "slot machine" psychology, sometimes it doesn't work so you have to pull it again. Being unpredictable makes the dopamine rush stronger when it works and gives you what you want. search for "slot machine social media" and you'll find a good deal of coverage. This usually applies to what posts are in an algorithmic feed, but I guess not having the feed show up at all is a fresh innovation. Twitter and Reddit both do a lot of just giving up and saying "woops, couldn't load that link you just clicked" as if that was a real problem. Really? what, the database wasn't there when you looked? Try again yourself, why make me click refresh? Another anecdata - search on facebook doesn't work for finding stuff in someone's timeline, so I've spent many minutes scrolling down someone's page trying to find a post. It's frustrating but I don't quit, and I'm sure metrics and impressions look great (no click through tho)

TheRealDunkirk 5y ago

Your comments make perfect sense in light of the fact that Reddit is the world's largest free porn site, with just enough "social" sprinkled on top to keep you engaged between wanks.

slugiscool99 5y ago
The only information I could find claims that about 22% of reddit is NSFW. They calculated the percentage of NSFW subreddits with >100k subscribers. [1] That's far from a perfect way to measure this, but it's around the statistic that 30% of the internet is porn. My intuition tells me Reddit probably reflects the internet as a whole pretty well. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/f94j0y/oc_how_much_of_reddit_is_pornographic/?sort=confidence https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/f94j0y/oc_...
- TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
  Well, just for the record, that doesn't invalidate what I said. I'm not concerned with what PERCENTAGE is porn. It still is the largest, most-easily-accessible, most searchable, free porn site. And also for the record, yes, I HATE that Reddit (and Twitter, et. al.) allow full-on NSFW content along with all the rest.
- listenallyall 5y ago
  Doesn't matter the percentage of subreddits (i.e. counting every qualifying subreddit equally), what is the percentage of eyeballs? And don't you think lots of people view porn subreddits without subscribing?

ska 5y ago

> And all the stats I've seen indicate much higher user engagement and time on site for Reddit compared to the other social platforms. >The biggest issue is of course that their monetization is horrible. It's possible that these two things are pretty tightly linked.

mschuster91 5y ago

> This is a 50% or more discount to the market-cap/unique visitor ratio of Twitter, Snap, and Facebook.[1] And all the stats I've seen indicate much higher user engagement and time on site for Reddit compared to the other social platforms. Most people have one Snap / FB account and one, maximum two Twitter accounts... but throwaways are the norm on Reddit (as well as HN), which means Reddit's user count is inflated by quite a bit. Additionally, Reddit has large nsfw communities that draw lots of members and visitors (again, most with separate accounts!), and these can't be reasonably monetized at all.

Havoc 5y ago

> On a visitor perspective, this seems undervalued. Cause they’re always one drama away from losing tons of people. The platform seems to attract drama involving the platform and decisions made more than say Twitter does

pgayed 5y ago

> should be throwing an insane amount of money and equity to get a Sheryl Sandberg like executive This is correct but also bittersweet.

nl 5y ago

One of the main reasons their monetization is so bad is that their mobile app is terrible. Mobile Apps are important for monetization because they are much less vulnerable to ad blockers, people are used to ads taking up more of the screen in scrollable content and in most cases carry more traffic than desktop versions. I think the disastrous experience buying and targeting ads is bad too, but the lack of a decent mobile app is a huge factor.

ButtSpark69 5y ago

As a reddit user, this sounds exactly like you're trying to drive me away from the site.

deleted 5y ago

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