There wasn't a ton of new stuff here for anyone who has been on reddit for any significant period of time but I did enjoy a few points.
1. The quotes they pulled from various news sources over the years from reddit workers as well as Conde Nast were interesting.
- Following the spinoff, David Carr, the late media columnist for the New York Times, wrote an assessment of Condé Nast’s less-is-more management strategy for raising their enfant terrible. Carr noted that Newhouse was determined “that his company would not be the blob that ate Reddit.” The headline: “Left Alone by Its Owner, Reddit Soars.”
2. The succinct way they got to the heart of the issue regarding advertising...only to not elaborate on it at all.
- Sponsored posts also have limited appeal. Unless an advertiser explicitly chooses to turn off the comments, Redditors can respond the same way they do with any other submission. They can applaud it or mock it. Reddit pitches this idea as a unique credibility-enhancing opportunity—a chance to keep it real and roll around in the mud of the Web. Advertisers, a former Reddit salesperson says, tend to see it as a chance to get torched by virtual napalm.
kleinbl00 and I were discussing this over lunch the other day. Yes, facebook is going to give you more control over your audience than reddit. But reddit allows you to reach a pretty specific demographic... in a more organic way... and drill down to their specific interests. There is a way to make this work. Besides the problems with their general execution and disregard for the self-serve platform (redditors would be the biggest reddit advertisers and with success-stories, others would follow suit), reddit only spent the customer-service hours on outside "big" advertisers. But, regardless of all those issues, the biggest mothefucking problem is the fact you can end up out a bit of money while having your reputation destroyed.
On Facebook, you pay $XXX and, at the very worst, no one actually remembers your ad and your out $XXX and have the exact same reputation / recognition.
On reddit, there is the potential that after the $XXX, your reputation will be at -9000. Destroyed. Instead of "oh I recognize this, let me buy it", people go "oh man I saw that on reddit. It's terrible. I would never buy it." Now, your ad is actually costing you sales. I don't think a Facebook ad can do that.
A warning, try to ignore the 3 paragraph where it says:
- The site is built on anonymity. No e-mail address is needed to sign up, and Redditors interact using pseudonyms and avatars.
There aren't any stupid, glaring mistakes after that.
Why do people say this? What does a site look like that is a popular destination? Is it like really snazzy with like glossy pictures and fancy backgrounds and auto-playing videos (shudder) and...like...what???Nothing about the site suggests it’s a popular destination.
It's a good point. People ask me about Hubski all the time and they genuinely have no idea what it is. Most see it as a list of articles to read. They have no idea the number of people, conversations and relationships that exist behind that wall of text. How do you make that more evident? I don't think you can. Like most things worth while it takes an investment to see it. You could show a constantly updating ticker of new posts and new comments. I suppose.
Last night i was really tempted to ask, "So, like, is reddit a really ugly girl but she puts out?" Unfortunately I can't find a nicer metaphor that is also as accurate. I could say "a girl you're dating for her personality" but let's be honest, the thing bringing people to and back to reddit is more accurately something akin to putting out than having a great personality.
ORLY Reddit has avatars. They're just so poorly integrated that they don't matter. A few things worth noting about this article: 1) They note that Comscore and Reddit disagree about traffic, but then let it go and accept Reddit's numbers. This is a bigger deal than they make it- if ComScore says you've got 31m viewers and Reddit says you've got 164m, and you're using a 28m ComScore number for Wired, for example, then the online audience of Reddit is marginally bigger than the online audience of Wired, not five times as big. 2) When your CPM is according to Reddit's math and everyone else's CPM is according to ComScore's math, Reddit's ad rates are FIVE TIMES as expensive. I can tell you that an afternoon buy-out of /r/movies ("8m viewers") is $15k... but an afternoon buy-out of women 18-35 of greater Los Angeles on Facebook (which Facebook calculates at about 1.5m women) is $2k. 3) The lack of decent moderator tools, site transparency and questionable metrics combine to make Reddit stupid easy to game. Reddit isn't overrun by spam because most SEO won't bother with Reddit beyond a platform plugin or two. However, when TBWA decided that the Old Spice Man would dominate every goddamn social network there was, it cost them a $2k day rental at Smash Box, a sound guy, a DIT, two writers and an actor. Their total buy-in was probably $10-15k and they were at the top of the news cycle for three solid days. You can do that, or... buy one stinking banner ad in /r/movies for 24 hours. Same price. 4) In case you missed it, that's a company with a half billion dollar valuation and a factor-of-five dispute about metrics arguing that they don't need to be profitable. This is a company with $50m in VC funding that relies on donations to keep the servers running. 5) Alexis and Steve left October 31, 2009. Back then, /r/reddit.com had 200k subscribers. Even that's by Reddit's janky numbers... the actual community size was probably closer to 40k. In 2011, SomethingAwful had about 200k subscribers and SA is so fringe and sub rosa that the greater tech community has forgotten it exists. Alexis and Steve have literally zero experience with large communities. f'n /r/FFT is a backwater and it's got 150k subscribers (by Reddit's count). It gets maybe 3 modqueue items per day. 6) Those same ComScore reports that Reddit discredits also show that ~80% of Reddit's internet traffic comes from porn searches. There's a reason they gave violentacrez a trophy, rather than a leash- he was their rainmaker. Notice how one of the two advertisers they mentioned makes sex toys? So it's not just that Reddit has been managed "hands off" - it's that there's a fundamental disconnect between what reddit is and what reddit presents itself as and you don't have to dig very deep, as an advertiser, to determine this. That Bloomberg hasn't dug into this says a lot about the caliber of tech coverage right now.A warning, try to ignore the 3 paragraph where it says: "The site is built on anonymity. No e-mail address is needed to sign up, and Redditors interact using pseudonyms and avatars." There aren't any stupid, glaring mistakes after that.
The focus for now, he says, is product development and community growth. “Once we’ve figured out better moderation tools and better policies, and once we have a billion users and a robust mobile offering, then we’ll sit down and talk about monetization,” he says. “But now is not the time to talk about it.”
Crazy thing, hate to admit it, I actually sometimes like a very small portion of Facebook ads and have definitely "liked" pages at Facebook's suggestion. It's always writing stuff. But for that, the ads are actually something that yes, I would like to peruse and possibly pursue. Please show me more lit journals, independent presses, and writing groups. Then there are the days I get on WebMD and Facebook ads get really scary and off putting
Those are not avatars. Those are...yeah...not avatars in the way that the author of the article meant. Another thing that we aren't factoring in is the dedication you have to give to successfully win reddit. That money can be spent on ads...or gaming the frontpage...but either way it has to be a bit more than "Hey mr. designer in India..here's our logo...here's our styleguide...here's the headlines we want to use....I need 25 variations of banner ads @ 728x90, 300x250, etc." Those ads are then used across the board on any website. Those ads can be re-used in 3 months, 6 months, a year. You can email Mr. Designer again and do a whole new set of retargeting ads. Once a campaign has been set, it can be reused and repurposed for everything. Your TV ads end up as YouTube prerolls. Your magazine add gets squished and de-whitedspace'd. It takes very little thought after "here's the campaign copy." With reddit, you really have to have a dedicated campaign for reddit. I agree with all else you said though. I wonder if there are any case studies online regarding people who have ventured into reddit advertising.ORLY
Mmmm.... from a perspective of mile-high journalism, "avatar" is a good shorthand for what Reddit is trying to do. - Snoovatars - Trophy chests - Flair - high scores Without getting into the minutiae of Reddit's bizarre incentivization, "avatar" gets the point across. Oh, honey... /r/lounge runs comps. "Who can get 100k karma in a day." "Who can get 200k comment karma in two days." "Who can get an image to the top of /r/movies by 2pm." Reddit is stupendously easy to game and when you can get $2k worth of traffic for free, people will try. I've been working on an f'ing campaign for Alpine for four weeks now. The broadcast spots have been up for 2 weeks. A semi-talented epidemiologist/marketer could have had Alpine all over Reddit for that entire time without so much as firing up Premiere. And yeah - you have to give that special attention. But everyone is giving it special attention.Another thing that we aren't factoring in is the dedication you have to give to successfully win reddit.
I dunno, everyone does seem pretty blue over at reddit these days. Is... is this the door? I'll just... I'll see myself out.