If the market for initial public offerings recovers in the new year, one company that aims to go public early on is Reddit. An IPO will put the spotlight on the prospects for Reddit’s advertising business, which has fallen short of ambitious growth targetsoutlined by executives two years ago. ...
I don’t know if reddit ads provide a good roas. We tried a few campaigns and gave up because it was so far off what we see on other platforms. The community is super anti-advertising, the targeting is really limited by community and geo.
People go to reddit to veg out, not to shop. I think the only times I’ve made purchases based on things I’ve seen are when there’s a discussion and numerous people make a recommendation for the same thing, or maybe a few cases when the op is showcasing something they had a personal part in creating.
Back when Reddit was good the ads used to be like regular posts with a comment section, so you could actually talk about the product and exchange experiences, and the advertiser would sometimes respond. I found it to be a transparent and valuable way of advertising, and I actually liked the ads back then because there was a social and learning aspect to them. But of course they got rid of that, supposedly because what if somebody says something bad. They don’t understand that the lack of honesty and dialogue is what makes people loathe ads.
Fuck advertising, but that’s a brilliant idea.
From my most recent memory, advertisers can still enable the option to allow comments. It was an interesting idea, and I too appreciate it when advertisers went in there to communicate about valid questions and concerns with their product.
My suspicion is that the big advertisers are using marketing agencies who don’t have the time or budget to go and moderate inauthentic conversations in those comment threads however.
I agree and I also think companies will (or are) going to try more “organic” marketing by going into comments and pretending to be customers and recommend their products.
I thought about that when I went to a new hair salon and in their new customer form one of the questions was “how did you hear about us” and one of the options was Reddit.
I kind of would rather have ads if I had to because they are easier to identify. Now I can’t trust people in the Reddit comments.
If an advertiser figured out how to orchestrate that swarm of comments getting behind a recommendation that all seem very natural it would be difficult to tell that it’s an ad and not just organic feedback.
I share your worry as well that it may already be happening.
Reddit doesn’t allow targeting by community?! To me that seems like the most obvious feature.
No it does, I think it’s limited to only community and geo