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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 sp

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…..
    - pitterpatter 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. I'm curious what you like better in the new design? I personally find the floating bar at the top annoying. Not to mention the fact you have to click another button to actually see all the comments. Not to mention my biggest annoyance, clicking on the empty space on the sides when viewing a post will navigate to the subreddit?? Why?
      - cuu508 5y ago
        > Not to mention my biggest annoyance, clicking on the empty space on the sides when viewing a post will navigate to the subreddit?? Why? A/B testing shows it generates more engagement /s
    - potamic 5y ago
      Some things I think are objectively bad design - 1. Images open by default on my feed and videos and gifs autoplay as I scroll. It's a massive distraction. I'm trying to find content I might be interested in, but here I'm forced to scan pretty much every post out there. 2. On similar lines, showing a (cropped) summary for text posts. Again a distraction when you're trying to find content. The cropping makes it worse since you have to change the page after reading halfway through. 3. Having to click on view discussion to open the comments each time. This is a forum. The only reason I go there is to discuss. 4. Lack of borders for comments. It looks like one continuous feed and reduces grouping between individual comments. 5. Large avatars, icons on the reply bar compete for attention on every single comment. The reply bar on old reddit is so nicely blended away into the background. You don't see it unless you want to reply. 6. Hover popups on the large icons trigger unintentionally all the time. Very rarely do I need to see somebody's karma. What's the point of this feature even? This is basis design considerations for a discussion forum. I completely understand where they are coming from though. They are not interested in this being a discussion forum. They want to optimize for post views. The more views a post gets, the more they will be able to monetize. Engaging in discussion is time consuming and that time could be better spent in viewing more posts.
    - 5y ago
- paulcole 5y ago
  >People are going to those specialized communities to get real information from real users, not lies and misinformation (ads and marketing). Those specialized communities will cease to exist without something funding them. Either users get ready to get out their wallets or get used to ads and marketing (which are not wholly lies and misinformation). And more importantly remember it's Reddit's choice how users pay, not the end users.
  - colinmhayes 5y ago
    I'm not sure that's true. No one is paying the moderators currently. It's not like hosting costs of a forum are that high. Not that difficult to migrate all your users to a competing service if the community is un happy with the monetization scheme.
    - ahtihn 5y ago
      Migrating might not be that hard. Retaining existing users and attracting new users is much harder. For niche topics I tend to add "reddit" to google search queries, because there's a high likelihood of finding actual information. If those subreddits move to other services, they may not even show up in the sea of blogspam results.
  - wintermutestwin 5y ago
    How much money does it really cost to provide a discussion forum for a specialized community? Not so much as to warrant advertising pollution. Advertising is diametrically opposed to information sharing.
    - paulcole 5y ago
      Not necessarily how much it costs but more how much the provider wants to make. And w/ VCs involved in Reddit they're not looking for pennies.
  - IncRnd 5y ago
    > Those specialized communities will cease to exist without something funding them. And this very article embarassingly shows that after 16 years it is still investors who are funding those specialized communities.
l72 5y ago
I tried to advertise a product to a very niche group on reddit. I just wanted to select 4 specific sub-reddits and advertise to anyone that was a member or viewed that reddit. For some reason, reddit wouldn't let me advertise to 3 of the 4, and the 1 that they did let me advertise was very low volume (less than 100 members). I couldn't even get reddit to show a single ad, let alone have anyone click on it. Facebook brought in way more traffic, and some of it did convert, but I feel like my advertising costs were too high there, since you can only specify more general interests. It seems like reddit, had their advertising platform actually worked, would have been the perfect place for me.
- Doctor_Fegg 5y ago
  Yes, this. Google and Facebook make it super easy to advertise. Whenever I've tried to advertise on Reddit, nothing shows up, I have no idea why, and the advertising UI gives me no clues.
  - fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
    I’m feeling bad for some unknown director at Reddit when their boss reads this thread.
    - opinion-is-bad 5y ago
      Well, they are kind of failing at their job in a big way, likely costing the company billions of dollars in the process. I don’t feel that bad for them. 5% of other socials in revenue per user is comically bad.
      - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
        Taking in $400M at this stage is already a pretty sure sign of failure and that they don't know how to run a business. Probably too many MBAs busy optimizing their career ascendancy to be concerned with pesky details like competently securing revenue streams. It's not that hard to show ads to self-selecting niche audiences.
yissp 5y ago
I just checked /r/linux, which I browse on occasion, and the three sponsored posts I saw on the front page were for Intel vPro, Adobe Creative Cloud, and Google Chromebooks. Those all seem at least reasonably relevant.
- Dah00n 5y ago
  Really? I'd say they are closer to unreasonably irrelevant. Maybe I could stretch myself to see a Chomebook being interesting and relevant. To me seeing the other two would make me look negatively on the brands/products. If those who sees an add get nothing out of it except wasted time I'd say they are spam. Those sound like 100% spam to me in /r/linux.
  - sgerenser 5y ago
    Agreed, Adobe creative cloud doesn’t even run on Linux!
  - themacguffinman 5y ago
    Not sure why vPro would be irrelevant, vPro can work with Linux AFAICT and there's some overlap between /r/linux and /r/sysadmin [1]. [1] https://subredditstats.com/subreddit-user-overlaps/linux https://subredditstats.com/subreddit-user-overlaps/linux
- Doctor_Fegg 5y ago
  Adobe and Chromebook ads are all over Reddit. I don't read any tech or design subreddits yet I get them all the time. I doubt what you're seeing is targetted at all.
cwkoss 5y ago
Reddit should charge for all commercial posts. It would clean up spam and generate revenue. Make a special class of commercial account, include some 'verification' badge thingy. Let subreddits ban all commercial content, unpaid commercial content, or leave open (for commercial-specific subs). Let mods profit share in commercial posts. (And fix the moderator system so "first to register controls the sub" is no longer the case)
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  "And fix the moderator system so "first to register controls the sub" is no longer the case" Suggestions? This is a complex proplem.
  - NortySpock 5y ago
    "the top 20 most upvoted comments in the subreddit within the last year, with the user having more than X posts per year in the subreddit, Y karma per post and more than 1000 characters per post, are invited to become moderators" Only really works for the in-depth subreddits, I guess it's not going to get you far on image or other media-based subreddits...
    - tux3 5y ago
      That seems non obvious, the most upvoted comments are just as likely to be memes or jokes than in-depth research, and even if they are that may not correlate to a good mod very much at all.
      - spicybright 5y ago
        You can see this in action on ANY subreddit by sorting by "Top of all time". Almost every post is either some in-joke or meme, some random brigade that happened from a sudden temporary influx of users, etc. for at least the first 10 posts.
    - deelowe 5y ago
      Wouldn't this just turn reddit into a spam site?
tootie 5y ago
I think the problem is that reddit culture is virulently anti-consumerist and throw a fit every time they see an ad. I'll bet they get terrible conversion rates.
- LivelyTortoise 5y ago
  Thing is, I see a reasonable number of ads on Reddit, they're just rarely relevant to the subreddit I'm on. I think they could keep the same number of ads and target them better, and the results would improve.
- missedthecue 5y ago
  This is true. I can easily burn through all my daily ad spend on Reddit at rates of between $0.50 and $1.00 CPMs. And the click through rates are awful. On Facebook or Google, you've often got to spend at least $5-$10 per mille to be competitive in most verticals. $25 to $50 in some verticals like insurance. And it converts. The reddit userbase just isn't as monetizable.
- kevinmchugh 5y ago
  There's a lot of redditors who sense a corporate conspiracy anytime a brand name is mentioned, but there's tons of subreddits entirely about consumption. Media, food, hobbies. I was active on r/homebrewing for years and people talk about products they want to buy all the time. The trouble with those types is they all have very strong opinions and think most products are crap. They're not opposed to buying things, just shitty things.
  - heartbreak 5y ago
    There are also active subreddits for specific brands like /r/djimavic and /r/SonyAlpha
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
shuntress 5y ago
If you will suffer a brief crash course on ad terminology, you are describing "placements". A placement with an ad in it shown to a user is called an "impression". I agree that advertisers would pay reddit more for better ad space (also called "inventory") but that doesn't just happen automatically. Right now, I would assume they are integrating with some third party ad network and probably use fairly generic targeting information. The cost in time and money to either deepen that integration or rip it out and make a custom ad network is probably significant.
- bwship 5y ago
  Well they have the money part of that equation solved, at least for a while. How quickly can one blow through $410 million? 18 months?
loktarogar 5y ago
I wanted to run Reddit ads after to target users of a certain game after a big expansion launch. My site had a bunch of time-sensitive information that 1) was useful to the users of a specific subreddit, 2) would be useful for a week or so after the launch, 3) while it had a successful submission, I wanted to promote that submission for about a week afterwards to more people could see it. I put up a reddit ad for that submission and Reddit took 4 weeks to approve it. At that point, there was no point running the ad anymore. Another time I wanted to advertise to a new game that had a brand new subreddit to match but it was huge - 100k plus users in a week. Reddit simply wouldn't permit me to advertise to it because it was new. In my (limited) experience it feels like Reddit isn't making the money it could be because it doesn't want to.
- whall6 5y ago
  Strange that they make it difficult to pay them
TeeMassive 5y ago
> One thing that they do not seem to be taking advantage of is how specialized many of their communities are. Their default subs are utter crap and full of influence campaigns accounts; in addition to being nearly impossible to post to without punished in some way.
paxprose 5y ago
bundle that with a profile that easily identifies cross markets by other interests too. you get to double dip. millions of targetable demographic profiles all self sorted and prepackaged for whomever.
deanclatworthy 5y ago
Unfortunately I think the core audience of Reddit is probably somewhat well informed and probably running an ad block. I’d love to see the percentages. It makes total sense to be able to target communities and I think they need to just stick a banner on the right hand side and be done with it. Let moderators maybe even take a small cut in exchange for providing info and meta data on their community.
monkeydust 5y ago
True - I more frequently search for '<my question> + Reddit' on Google
alexgmcm 5y ago
Yeah, it's weird as if I'm browsing /r/buildapc I wouldn't even mind seeing relevant ads - same for stuff like /r/books etc. It does seem like a huge missed opportunity.

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…..
  - pitterpatter 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. I'm curious what you like better in the new design? I personally find the floating bar at the top annoying. Not to mention the fact you have to click another button to actually see all the comments. Not to mention my biggest annoyance, clicking on the empty space on the sides when viewing a post will navigate to the subreddit?? Why?
    - cuu508 5y ago
      > Not to mention my biggest annoyance, clicking on the empty space on the sides when viewing a post will navigate to the subreddit?? Why? A/B testing shows it generates more engagement /s
  - potamic 5y ago
    Some things I think are objectively bad design - 1. Images open by default on my feed and videos and gifs autoplay as I scroll. It's a massive distraction. I'm trying to find content I might be interested in, but here I'm forced to scan pretty much every post out there. 2. On similar lines, showing a (cropped) summary for text posts. Again a distraction when you're trying to find content. The cropping makes it worse since you have to change the page after reading halfway through. 3. Having to click on view discussion to open the comments each time. This is a forum. The only reason I go there is to discuss. 4. Lack of borders for comments. It looks like one continuous feed and reduces grouping between individual comments. 5. Large avatars, icons on the reply bar compete for attention on every single comment. The reply bar on old reddit is so nicely blended away into the background. You don't see it unless you want to reply. 6. Hover popups on the large icons trigger unintentionally all the time. Very rarely do I need to see somebody's karma. What's the point of this feature even? This is basis design considerations for a discussion forum. I completely understand where they are coming from though. They are not interested in this being a discussion forum. They want to optimize for post views. The more views a post gets, the more they will be able to monetize. Engaging in discussion is time consuming and that time could be better spent in viewing more posts.
  - 5y ago
paulcole 5y ago
>People are going to those specialized communities to get real information from real users, not lies and misinformation (ads and marketing). Those specialized communities will cease to exist without something funding them. Either users get ready to get out their wallets or get used to ads and marketing (which are not wholly lies and misinformation). And more importantly remember it's Reddit's choice how users pay, not the end users.
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  I'm not sure that's true. No one is paying the moderators currently. It's not like hosting costs of a forum are that high. Not that difficult to migrate all your users to a competing service if the community is un happy with the monetization scheme.
  - ahtihn 5y ago
    Migrating might not be that hard. Retaining existing users and attracting new users is much harder. For niche topics I tend to add "reddit" to google search queries, because there's a high likelihood of finding actual information. If those subreddits move to other services, they may not even show up in the sea of blogspam results.
- wintermutestwin 5y ago
  How much money does it really cost to provide a discussion forum for a specialized community? Not so much as to warrant advertising pollution. Advertising is diametrically opposed to information sharing.
  - paulcole 5y ago
    Not necessarily how much it costs but more how much the provider wants to make. And w/ VCs involved in Reddit they're not looking for pennies.
- IncRnd 5y ago
  > Those specialized communities will cease to exist without something funding them. And this very article embarassingly shows that after 16 years it is still investors who are funding those specialized communities.

l72 5y ago

I tried to advertise a product to a very niche group on reddit. I just wanted to select 4 specific sub-reddits and advertise to anyone that was a member or viewed that reddit. For some reason, reddit wouldn't let me advertise to 3 of the 4, and the 1 that they did let me advertise was very low volume (less than 100 members). I couldn't even get reddit to show a single ad, let alone have anyone click on it. Facebook brought in way more traffic, and some of it did convert, but I feel like my advertising costs were too high there, since you can only specify more general interests. It seems like reddit, had their advertising platform actually worked, would have been the perfect place for me.

Doctor_Fegg 5y ago
Yes, this. Google and Facebook make it super easy to advertise. Whenever I've tried to advertise on Reddit, nothing shows up, I have no idea why, and the advertising UI gives me no clues.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
  I’m feeling bad for some unknown director at Reddit when their boss reads this thread.
  - opinion-is-bad 5y ago
    Well, they are kind of failing at their job in a big way, likely costing the company billions of dollars in the process. I don’t feel that bad for them. 5% of other socials in revenue per user is comically bad.
    - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
      Taking in $400M at this stage is already a pretty sure sign of failure and that they don't know how to run a business. Probably too many MBAs busy optimizing their career ascendancy to be concerned with pesky details like competently securing revenue streams. It's not that hard to show ads to self-selecting niche audiences.

yissp 5y ago

I just checked /r/linux, which I browse on occasion, and the three sponsored posts I saw on the front page were for Intel vPro, Adobe Creative Cloud, and Google Chromebooks. Those all seem at least reasonably relevant.

Dah00n 5y ago
Really? I'd say they are closer to unreasonably irrelevant. Maybe I could stretch myself to see a Chomebook being interesting and relevant. To me seeing the other two would make me look negatively on the brands/products. If those who sees an add get nothing out of it except wasted time I'd say they are spam. Those sound like 100% spam to me in /r/linux.
- sgerenser 5y ago
  Agreed, Adobe creative cloud doesn’t even run on Linux!
- themacguffinman 5y ago
  Not sure why vPro would be irrelevant, vPro can work with Linux AFAICT and there's some overlap between /r/linux and /r/sysadmin [1]. [1] https://subredditstats.com/subreddit-user-overlaps/linux https://subredditstats.com/subreddit-user-overlaps/linux
Doctor_Fegg 5y ago
Adobe and Chromebook ads are all over Reddit. I don't read any tech or design subreddits yet I get them all the time. I doubt what you're seeing is targetted at all.

cwkoss 5y ago

Reddit should charge for all commercial posts. It would clean up spam and generate revenue. Make a special class of commercial account, include some 'verification' badge thingy. Let subreddits ban all commercial content, unpaid commercial content, or leave open (for commercial-specific subs). Let mods profit share in commercial posts. (And fix the moderator system so "first to register controls the sub" is no longer the case)

hutzlibu 5y ago
"And fix the moderator system so "first to register controls the sub" is no longer the case" Suggestions? This is a complex proplem.
- NortySpock 5y ago
  "the top 20 most upvoted comments in the subreddit within the last year, with the user having more than X posts per year in the subreddit, Y karma per post and more than 1000 characters per post, are invited to become moderators" Only really works for the in-depth subreddits, I guess it's not going to get you far on image or other media-based subreddits...
  - tux3 5y ago
    That seems non obvious, the most upvoted comments are just as likely to be memes or jokes than in-depth research, and even if they are that may not correlate to a good mod very much at all.
    - spicybright 5y ago
      You can see this in action on ANY subreddit by sorting by "Top of all time". Almost every post is either some in-joke or meme, some random brigade that happened from a sudden temporary influx of users, etc. for at least the first 10 posts.
  - deelowe 5y ago
    Wouldn't this just turn reddit into a spam site?

tootie 5y ago

I think the problem is that reddit culture is virulently anti-consumerist and throw a fit every time they see an ad. I'll bet they get terrible conversion rates.

LivelyTortoise 5y ago
Thing is, I see a reasonable number of ads on Reddit, they're just rarely relevant to the subreddit I'm on. I think they could keep the same number of ads and target them better, and the results would improve.
missedthecue 5y ago
This is true. I can easily burn through all my daily ad spend on Reddit at rates of between $0.50 and $1.00 CPMs. And the click through rates are awful. On Facebook or Google, you've often got to spend at least $5-$10 per mille to be competitive in most verticals. $25 to $50 in some verticals like insurance. And it converts. The reddit userbase just isn't as monetizable.
kevinmchugh 5y ago
There's a lot of redditors who sense a corporate conspiracy anytime a brand name is mentioned, but there's tons of subreddits entirely about consumption. Media, food, hobbies. I was active on r/homebrewing for years and people talk about products they want to buy all the time. The trouble with those types is they all have very strong opinions and think most products are crap. They're not opposed to buying things, just shitty things.
- heartbreak 5y ago
  There are also active subreddits for specific brands like /r/djimavic and /r/SonyAlpha

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

shuntress 5y ago

If you will suffer a brief crash course on ad terminology, you are describing "placements". A placement with an ad in it shown to a user is called an "impression". I agree that advertisers would pay reddit more for better ad space (also called "inventory") but that doesn't just happen automatically. Right now, I would assume they are integrating with some third party ad network and probably use fairly generic targeting information. The cost in time and money to either deepen that integration or rip it out and make a custom ad network is probably significant.

bwship 5y ago
Well they have the money part of that equation solved, at least for a while. How quickly can one blow through $410 million? 18 months?

loktarogar 5y ago

I wanted to run Reddit ads after to target users of a certain game after a big expansion launch. My site had a bunch of time-sensitive information that 1) was useful to the users of a specific subreddit, 2) would be useful for a week or so after the launch, 3) while it had a successful submission, I wanted to promote that submission for about a week afterwards to more people could see it. I put up a reddit ad for that submission and Reddit took 4 weeks to approve it. At that point, there was no point running the ad anymore. Another time I wanted to advertise to a new game that had a brand new subreddit to match but it was huge - 100k plus users in a week. Reddit simply wouldn't permit me to advertise to it because it was new. In my (limited) experience it feels like Reddit isn't making the money it could be because it doesn't want to.

whall6 5y ago
Strange that they make it difficult to pay them

TeeMassive 5y ago

> One thing that they do not seem to be taking advantage of is how specialized many of their communities are. Their default subs are utter crap and full of influence campaigns accounts; in addition to being nearly impossible to post to without punished in some way.

paxprose 5y ago

bundle that with a profile that easily identifies cross markets by other interests too. you get to double dip. millions of targetable demographic profiles all self sorted and prepackaged for whomever.

deanclatworthy 5y ago

Unfortunately I think the core audience of Reddit is probably somewhat well informed and probably running an ad block. I’d love to see the percentages. It makes total sense to be able to target communities and I think they need to just stick a banner on the right hand side and be done with it. Let moderators maybe even take a small cut in exchange for providing info and meta data on their community.

monkeydust 5y ago

True - I more frequently search for '<my question> + Reddit' on Google

alexgmcm 5y ago

Yeah, it's weird as if I'm browsing /r/buildapc I wouldn't even mind seeing relevant ads - same for stuff like /r/books etc. It does seem like a huge missed opportunity.