Reddit Promises Post Sponsors a 'Walled Garden' of Conversation (cnbc.com) 63
"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.
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
Growth? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
The only things in nature, that grow infinitely .. (Score:1)
... are deadly pathogens and explosions.
Everyting that survives, is in an elegant balance and goes in closed cycles.
That is the only way to prevent resourcr exhaustion and hence death.
It is so brutally obvious that infinite exponential growth is impossible, that no explanation in the world will help those who don't get it.
If they wouldn't harm others with them, we could just let it accelerate towards its obvious end, and let the problem solve itself.
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Don't forget cancer.
But of course mainstream economics assumes infinite growth. Mainstream politics is based on mainstream economics.
Good luck with that.
Re: The only things in nature, that grow infinitel (Score:2)
But it's working out so well for a very few of us?
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Yet, we cling to "economic growth" like priests in an Altar Boy.
FIxed that for ya.
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If lots of your posts keep getting modded down no apparent reason, you just might be the asshole.
Or there could just be lots of assholes modding.
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Post something not negative to /r/poltics and see what happens. I was banned last week for posting a story about more jobs than were expected were added last month.
The banning there is out of control.
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Or trumpgret. I was banned from both for not being anti-Trump enough. They are true echo chambers.
Re: What's /.'s ad revenue compared to its traff (Score:1)
"comments promoting a left-wing agenda upmodded, while anyone with real insight or with truthful information gets downmodded"
Here we see the unaware right-wing douchebag in its natural habitat - cluelessness.
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WTF are you talking about? That site has ten thousand separate areas, each policed by different people.
A company and an economy are different (Score:2)
The United States is an economy. It can have economic growth, or it can have a recession.
Comcast is a company, not an economy. A company getting bigger isn't economic growth. Let's not confuse the two different things.
Would you like to make a case that recession (economic shrinking) is a good thing?
Or is your point that larger companies often provide mediocre products, which has absolutely nothing at all to do with economic growth?
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How about stablizing?
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i.e. Once market share reaches the point that consumer choice is crushed, the company can behave abusively (aka 'fully monetize the customer') - as seen in cable TV where you've got 1 provider.
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In this case, strictly the economic growth of the investors. Watch out for the investors behind Reddit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org], they are not to be trusted.
This story, their plan, a pump and dump, run up short term income by turning Reddit into a straight up propaganda channel, especially targeting upcoming elections and they sell, sell, sell, before censored Reddit users abandon the platform.
A lot of people go there mainly as a result of internet searches. Many of the forums are empty and most a
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"More ad revenue" is not "growth". It is just shifting around of money. Also, if they do not have the ad revenue now because of their visitors, if they ban/intimidate/moderate their current visitors away, they will have less visitors and will become irrelevant when people move away to places where they can actually express themselves. In the end, this may just kill Reddit, in a typical result from greed combined with stupidity.
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Yup, the reason reddit is the third most trafficked site on the Internet is that it mostly doesn't suck. I don't mind buying reddit gold to kill the ads; hopefully they won't get rid of that in their quest to monetize my eyeballs. If they do, oh well, it's not like reddit would be that hard to replicate.
Progressive profit tax for companies (Score:3)
Income tax is progressive in most civilized states, for good reasons. Maybe applying a similar progression for companies would be beneficial. I see a number of benefits and justifications:
Larger companies get unfair advantages because of their power and influence. Progressive tax would offset the and create a more level playing field for all companies.
It would place a cap on companies size in and thus create more and smaller companies, resulting in more competition and this a more dynamic market.
How about doing it right? (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Obsessed With Disguising It as Content (Score:4, Insightful)
https://news.slashdot.org/comm... [slashdot.org]
[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).
If you are too scared to advertise (Score:2)
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As my grandmother used to say "the adverts speak very highly of it, dear" - implying that no one would speak highly of it unless well paid.
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Great products don't need advertising, people will buy them anyway.
What needs advertising is the mediocre and bad stuff.
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>creating a ‘walled garden’ of conversation you [the advertiser] can moderate or ban as needed," the slide says.
Giving the advertiser upvote control and banning privileges over the subreddit's mods is going to go over real well I predict. LOL
Exactly - I mean who in the bloody hell is going to want to participate in a forum like that?
Oh look Ads! We want ads! we want to be controlled by advertizers and never ever post anythin that displeases the Advertiser!
Next up? Television ads where they tap into your Google Home or Amazon Echo and send thugs to beat the shit out of you if you say anything bad about the products.
I don't see ads on any sites (Score:5, Funny)
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Same here. In a sense, we are the new 1% though...
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Your browser's session configurations are all well and good on hardware made to compute, but killing the motherboard is coming whether it has been called thin clients, or now appliances, ... whatever, it doesn't matter, and...
Until such time, not seeing ads is a marginally useful control group.
Safe Places (Score:1)
It amazes me that today even ads need their safe spaces. Safe spaces are completely the wrong approach. All they do is reinforce whatever it is they're trying to prevent (unless it's group think). I don't blame a company if its microwave ad shows up next to a story of a dead baby. Anyone who gets upset about that needs to grow up.
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Are you really surprised though? These companies are simply not able or prepared to deal with feedback disseminated on the same the level as their own PR. Over a zillion marketing years, they became used to the Broadcast-Goes-1-Way-Only style and this new interactive model hampers their ability to 'control their message'.
What they want, is to make sure they can puff-up and rave about whatever trash they are selling people, and specifically not have unfavourable views presented.
They are disgusting and weak,
Owned by the owners (Score:1)
A problem on Reddit can be when a forum is owned by the owners. An example of this is the Albion Online forum. It is moderated by the employees of the company that produces the MMO 'Albion Online'. For this reason it's just as 'critical' of the way the MMO is operated as the official Albion Online forums.
SJW police do not grow a brand (Score:2)
When a SJW steps in to ban, remove, report that stops the flow of a normal conversation between normal people enjoying a conversation on a listed topic.
Users then have to self censor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] and second guess the politics of the SJW appointed to control content.
That gets a censorship reputation. Whats has the political SJW set up as their red line for comments and content https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki [wikipedia.org]