Calling them “free-form ads,” Reddit said the new advertisements are its most native format ever, designed to look and feel like community content shared by real people.
The ads, meant to mimic the site’s megathreads, will enable advertisers to utilize a variety of formats in one post, including images, videos, and text.
According to numbers from Reddit, free-form ads got 28% more clicks than all other types of ads on the site and saw a jump in community engagement.
The next time you see an interesting post in your Reddit feed, take a closer look - because it might just be a paid advertisement.
If it’s not already the law, it needs to be. It should be required that paid advertising be disclosed in all contexts.
Paid ads should not only need to be marked, but noticeably different in a timeline. Something obvious like a different post color.
Twitter fits ads in the middle of content and just puts a little tiny “Ad” in the upper corner (on mobile at least) and at a glance scrolling through you can’t tell it’s an ad, other than all of their ads now being for some shady mobile game that lies about how it looks or crypto in various forms. Those should be required to have a different color background than actual user posts, not just a size 8 font “Ad” in the corner of the post on a 3.5" screen.
In fact, let’s make it impossible to implement well, let’s take a page out of the NHTSA handbook and require the “Ad” text to be a specific real world size like they do with the car warning lights. Make them figure out what size it needs to be for various screen sizes and display DPI if they want to shove ads in the middle of content like it was user posts.
I think what YouTube does would be sufficient. There’s a noticeably different video progress bar colour (yellow instead of red) and a large “Skip Ad in __” in the corner, plus the advertiser information on the side.
Reddit could do this by putting a “Paid advertisement” watermark in the corner or putting “Advert” where the upvote/downvote buttons are and colouring it some noticeable colour, like yellow, and I would be satisfied with that.
Pretty sure this is not legal in many countries. Adverts must be at the very least labeled as such, like Google does with a tiny almost unnoticeable label.
In my country TV ads are explicitly marked with text in one corner
In the US, most TV commercials are so obviously TV commercials that they don’t label them. Some TV stations do have bumpers they air when the TV show goes to break and comes back from break.
I stopped watching local news when they started having the anchors pitch to ads like they were just another news item.
In my country, paper press as to identify when something looks like an article, but it’s an ad.
In another article they post a photo of an example from reddit and it does say promoted next to the post title. So there’s something there because there is an FTC law saying ads must be disclosed. Obviously they want to obfuscate that it’s an ad as much as possible though so who knows how that’ll change.
Like so:
Annoying and all that, but something pretty common in most social media sites I see nowadays. I quickly learn to filter anything with that label out as junk.
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That’s not a nice thing to say about Trump.
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That’s already the case in at least the Netherlands.
Its a law where I live…