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.
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.