How Reddit Challenges Google and Meta with Ads Based on Topics - Not User Data (yahoo.com) 47
Six months after going public, Reddit "is winning over advertisers," reports Bloomberg, "by showing that it's different than other internet platforms, which often rely on users' identities and personal information to target ads."
Instead, Reddit is targeting people based on their interests, relying on the site's [100,000+] deeply detailed communities — called subreddits — to match advertisers with potential customers... Early returns on that strategy have been promising. The text-based site easily surpassed expectations in its first two earnings reports this year, disclosing strong sales and better-than-expected projected growth. The stock is up 66% from its $34 initial public offering price in March.
Beyond targeting subreddits, the company also can use specific keywords to sell what it calls conversation ads. If a Redditor in r/HydroHomies — a community about the benefits of drinking water that has more than 1.2 million users — asks for advice about a specific brand of water bottle, an ad for that exact product could appear next to that user's post. These conversation ads are the fastest-growing ad format on the platform, the company said. They also give marketers a chance to appear in subreddits where customers are already talking about them...
Despite being around for close to 20 years, Reddit only started investing heavily in its advertising business in 2018, and is now hoping that marketers and investors are ready to acknowledge the site has grown up. Executives often point to its unique form of content moderation as proof that it's a safer place for brands than other sites. Reddit largely relies on a group of more than 60,000 human moderators — users who volunteer to serve as a sort of content police — to flag or take down unsavory content. On top of that, the site has a voting system so users can rate the quality of content. "From everything we're seeing, they have a level of brand safety and content safety for advertisers that is very comparable to most other social platforms," said Jack Johnston, senior social innovation director at performance marketing agency Tinuiti, which buys ads on Meta, Pinterest, X and Reddit. "That wasn't necessarily the case a couple years ago."
Those improvements have paid dividends. Reddit recently signed new content partnerships with major sports leagues, including the NFL, NBA and MLB, and the majority of Reddit's advertising revenue comes from Fortune 500 companies. Last year, the site made close to $800 million in ad sales, and counts marquee brands like Toyota, Disney, Samsung and Ulta Beauty among its advertisers. This year, analysts expect Reddit's overall advertising business to eclipse $1.1 billion in revenue and see the company reaching $2 billion in sales as soon as 2027, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. To get there, Reddit will need to court smaller marketers, too. The company makes more than 25% of its revenue from just 10 advertisers, meaning any unexpected pullback from a key partner could have a significant impact on the company's business, said Dan Salmon, lead analyst at New Street Research. "This army of small businesses — that's the most important thing for all of those platforms, for Reddit, for Pinterest, for X," he said...
Advertisers large and small say they're already planning to spend more on Reddit in the coming quarters.
The article points out that more than 90 million people visit Reddit each day.
Beyond targeting subreddits, the company also can use specific keywords to sell what it calls conversation ads. If a Redditor in r/HydroHomies — a community about the benefits of drinking water that has more than 1.2 million users — asks for advice about a specific brand of water bottle, an ad for that exact product could appear next to that user's post. These conversation ads are the fastest-growing ad format on the platform, the company said. They also give marketers a chance to appear in subreddits where customers are already talking about them...
Despite being around for close to 20 years, Reddit only started investing heavily in its advertising business in 2018, and is now hoping that marketers and investors are ready to acknowledge the site has grown up. Executives often point to its unique form of content moderation as proof that it's a safer place for brands than other sites. Reddit largely relies on a group of more than 60,000 human moderators — users who volunteer to serve as a sort of content police — to flag or take down unsavory content. On top of that, the site has a voting system so users can rate the quality of content. "From everything we're seeing, they have a level of brand safety and content safety for advertisers that is very comparable to most other social platforms," said Jack Johnston, senior social innovation director at performance marketing agency Tinuiti, which buys ads on Meta, Pinterest, X and Reddit. "That wasn't necessarily the case a couple years ago."
Those improvements have paid dividends. Reddit recently signed new content partnerships with major sports leagues, including the NFL, NBA and MLB, and the majority of Reddit's advertising revenue comes from Fortune 500 companies. Last year, the site made close to $800 million in ad sales, and counts marquee brands like Toyota, Disney, Samsung and Ulta Beauty among its advertisers. This year, analysts expect Reddit's overall advertising business to eclipse $1.1 billion in revenue and see the company reaching $2 billion in sales as soon as 2027, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. To get there, Reddit will need to court smaller marketers, too. The company makes more than 25% of its revenue from just 10 advertisers, meaning any unexpected pullback from a key partner could have a significant impact on the company's business, said Dan Salmon, lead analyst at New Street Research. "This army of small businesses — that's the most important thing for all of those platforms, for Reddit, for Pinterest, for X," he said...
Advertisers large and small say they're already planning to spend more on Reddit in the coming quarters.
The article points out that more than 90 million people visit Reddit each day.
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
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You could always try this [imgur.com] to snarf out the bots and report them.
Comment removed (Score:4)
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The platform has to run on some computers, and needs energy and maintenance. So it costs money. If the advertisement is goal directed and not based on random shit, that is perfectly Oki.
Go ahead and host a platform like reddit, and don't cry when you are bankrupt in a week or two.
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Nice FP branch, though I don't think it fully captures the stench of Reddit. The joke I was looking for was something about Reddit seizing the business opportunity created by the shitification of the cesspool formerly known as Twitter. "Stinks to high heaven" as my mother used to say?
Disclaimer needed, but what? I've sincerely tried to get some value or valuable information out of Reddit for some years. Never found it, even when guided in by external search (as suggested in another comment).
The root of the
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Reddit's search has always sucked, to the point that it is generally better to use Google than the site's native search function when looking for anything.
You know what? It wouldn't be the dumbest thing in the world to train an AI bot on Reddit data and have an AI button next to that magnifying glass. Or have limited search results return a top result of "there aren't many good matches on those terms, click here for synthetic and interactive AI-generated results".
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Bot pretending to be user: "Hi [user's name], it seems you're interested in Acme water bottles. Would you like to buy a ProductX water bottle?"
User: "No, as I was saying, I was wondering..."
Bot pretending to be user: "The difference between Acme & ProductX water bottles is that..."
User: "Please stop hi-jacking this thread to promote your own products."
Bot pretending to be user: [Carries on trying to promote own products...]
Sequence sounds like Fox "News" anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum trying to interject and then cut off a rambling Trump on the phone after the DNC the other day because their time slot was over and they had to switch to the next program. Fox Cuts Off Ranting Trump Then Mocks: ‘He’s Still Talking!’ [yahoo.com] Gutfeld open his show saying, "That wasn’t my fault, Donald Trump! ... He’s still talking, by the way." :-)
Sometimes I think Redditors deserve all the get (Score:5, Funny)
a community about the benefits of drinking water that has more than 1.2 million users
If you're in a subbreddit about the benefits of drinking water, you deserve to be advertisement fodder. What next? A subbreddit about the benefits of breathing air?
Re:Sometimes I think Redditors deserve all the get (Score:5, Interesting)
"What next? A subbreddit about the benefits of breathing air?"
Oh, you must feel so good about making that snarky comment.
Now, switch your brain on for a second and read me.
Wouldn't you be interested, depending on the city/country you live in, to be able to measure yourself the quality of the air you breathe? The PM 2.5 rate?
You would need to then know what would be the best appliances for that? Best cost/effectiveness ratio? Best accuracy of measurement?
That's where you would ask: a subreddit about breathing air.
I appreciate your point and (Score:2)
r/HydroHomies -- a community about the benefits of drinking water
This indicates the benefits of the drinking of the water, not the benefits of drinking-water. So your response could be interpreted as the benefits of air-breathing misconstrued as the need to find the breathing quality of air, which is indeed critical. This is not about finding out if your drinking-water is clean. It's about vanity--look at us. The
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"What next? A subbreddit about the benefits of breathing air?"
Breathing is fatal. Fact: 100% of all dead people were habitual breathers. :-)
[From one of my college text books on logic.]
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That's true to three significant figures, but it wouldn't be /. without some pedant pointing out that perinatal anoxia deaths mean that some people were born and died without ever breathing.
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I got an air quality meter for my home office and it was an eye opener. Keeping CO2 levels down has really helped make it a more pleasant environment. I was thinking about getting some kind of vent, maybe one with a heat retention system, just so I can automate running it rather than having to manually open windows when CO2 levels rise.
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I hear water is very popular.
Millions of people drink it every day.
Same with air. I often breathe air.
<wink>
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I hear water is very popular.
Millions of people drink it every day.
Historically speaking, most of the people who drank water at least once during their lifetimes ended up dying. This is a secret big water won't tell you.
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Re: Sometimes I think Redditors deserve all the ge (Score:2)
Credit where itâ(TM)s due-they seem to be doi (Score:2)
I assumed reddit stock would tank and the company would go the way of digg. I got those signals wrong.
The internet needs something like reddit, I guess, and theyâ(TM)ve done a decent job of retaining enough old users plus attracting new ones and advertisers. Sigh that we canâ(TM)t seem to create a high quality, well and equitably moderated, and free alternative.
Re: Credit where itâ(TM)s due-they seem to be (Score:2)
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I assumed reddit stock would tank and the company would go the way of digg. I got those signals wrong.
it will. once the ai scraping rush subsides and lots of people have lost the billions they invested in llm nonsense because they were told it's the holy grail. odds are that reddit's owners will have burned that huge pile of easy cash they got from openai and will be back at infuriating their loyal userbase of snowflakes with aggressive pricing because ads are just not enough.
I prefer that to tracking. x100 times. (Score:5, Informative)
I prefer they show adverts about what I am discussing and where I am discussing it, instead of tracking me through the whole internet and building a privacy-raping profile on me, like Google and all the others do. So yeah, that's a good point for Reddit.
For those who don't know:
You can browse the vast majority of subreddits without logging in.
You can still browse the NSFW ones without logging by replacing the "www" of https://www.reddit.com/r/examp... [reddit.com] with "old" like this: https://old.reddit.com/r/examp... [reddit.com] (Yes, there are firefox extensions to do just that if want).
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Yeah, at least this way you only get refrigerator ads when reading a thread on refrigerators, and not have them following you everywhere just because you recently bought one and are therefore "obviously" in the market to buy more.
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I prefer they show adverts about what I am discussing and where I am discussing it, instead of tracking me through the whole internet and building a privacy-raping profile on me, like Google and all the others do.
Sure - but what about the almost inevitable development that will have them doing both things? Do you really think those "privacy-raping profiles" are going away? There may be a short hiatus but - absent effective regulation and enforcement - privacy will continue to be raped, even on Reddit.
Advertisers have limitless appetites. It seems that they also have bottomless pockets, so the Web's current "race to the bottom" probably won't end unless and until the whole thing self-destructs. Advertisers won't be h
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I prefer they show adverts about what I am discussing and where I am discussing it, instead of tracking me through the whole internet and building a privacy-raping profile on me,
Because you believe they don't do both?
Hint: there's money to be made in both.
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It's the only targeted ad space (Score:4, Interesting)
Reddit users are self segregating into interest groups, you know they are legitimately interested in whatever thing you are advertising to when your ads are posted in specific subreddits.
Ad targeting on Facebook works like this: any time you interact with a post other than with a block (whether with a react or a comment) all of the "interest" tags attached to the post are attached to you, too. Then people advertise to those tags, and they are told that they are doing targeted advertising.
It's easy to see why advertisers would be more interested in the former than the latter. They are still going to pour a bunch of dollars down the facebook hole because there are still a lot of users there; same for Twitter. But if they believe they're getting targeting on those platforms, they're dumb as shit.
I'm not sure how the feed ads work on Twitter, I haven't got a feel for that yet. The way they work for me is they all get blocked, because I don't want to be advertised to by anyone dumb enough to advertise on Twitter. But I have noticed that they do have fairly well-targeted advertising once you have clicked into a tweet. The ads that appear there are generally pretty much on-message, except of course when they are exactly opposed to whatever is being discussed. That's very likely intentional, though, because mostly I see that with political ads. This helps explain why some companies are still happy to advertise there, the targeting is MUCH better than on Facebook. When my ad blocker fails on Facebook (which happens periodically due to updates of the site) I can see that there is absolutely no sense to what ads are being displayed.
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When my ad blocker fails on Facebook (which happens periodically due to updates of the site) I can see that there is absolutely no sense to what ads are being displayed.
I don't use Facebook or Twit-X, so I have no experience with their advertising and how it might work. Is it possible that the ads you see on Facebook aren't on-point simply because your security measures have stopped them from gathering the data that would make the targeting more personal?
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Is it possible that the ads you see on Facebook aren't on-point simply because your security measures have stopped them from gathering the data that would make the targeting more personal?
That doesn't really follow, because I'm logged in and I post. They have much better metrics than reacts (like shares) to know what I'm actually interested in.
And ads still do not work (Score:3)
The ad peddlers have a long time ago decided to just measure brand recognition. So "I hate these assholes with their obnoxious ads and would never buy from them" counts as successful advertising.
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The "no such thing a bad publicity" thing only goes so far - e.g. I bet Boeing wish they had less publicity over the last few years.
Anyway, isn't the success of online ads measured by click-thrus?
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They prefer post-click conversion analysis, but that requires intrusive tracking.
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Oops, I meant post view. Post click is easy to track.
Ads that cater to user interest? Crazy talk! (Score:3)
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Choose is present tense.
Too Addictive (Score:1)
Far from perfect.. (Score:2)
I'm vegan, it's no secret looking at my profile or subscriptions, and keep getting ads for things like McDonald's and the Dairy Board of Canada.
Money well spent.
Here's what I want (Score:2)
When I'm in the market for a product or service, I want all suppliers to give me their best pitch
Once I decide to buy or not, I want ALL pitches to stop
I don't want spam about unrelated products
I don't want detail-free ads with pictures of attractive people and no technical information
Current "targeted" ads are incredibly stupid
Somehow, the facebook ad robot decided I was a dental lab and started sending me ads for 3D tooth printers
If I browse a site, I often get multiple, repetitive ads for one particular
Best Ad Strategy for my Total Spending Response (Score:2)
Advertise products for my FULL ATTENTION
I promise to BOYCOTT the brand FOREVER. .
Decent but needs an ad blocker. (Score:2)
Sure. (Score:1)