Reddit's new paid ads look exactly like user posts ( www.zdnet.com )

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.

klef25 ,

Any ad that starts with TIL or DAE gets an immediate down vote, a cringe, and no further reading

ILikeBoobies ,

This isn’t new, a few years ago I was looking at their ad program and they had inline post ads that you were taught to post like a user

Savas ,

Ads are not the only reason, but if you're still on reddit, you clearly missed the point why reddit became popular.

DingoBilly ,

Welcome to 5 years ago? This has been around for years...

soggy_kitty ,

OP lives under a rock

Cyclist ,

This is what killed Digg in 2010.

buddascrayon ,

How is this news? Reddit has been doing this for literally years.

denast ,

Recently went on Reddit and laughed hysterically at the amount of religious propaganda I saw in this format. Example:

1000009776

MaxPow3r11 ,

-religious propaganda
-gambling bullshit (including crypto/crypto adjacent bullshit)
-military brainwashing/propaganda
-alcohol ads

Just the worst fucking garbage bullshit.

DragonTypeWyvern ,

r/Atheism held the line for decades, and y'all cyberbullied them for it.

andros_rex ,

IMHO, it was an elevator ride that killed r/atheism…

raynethackery ,

OOTL. Can you explain further?

andros_rex ,

Rebecca Watson had some guy proposition in her in an elevator at a conference, felt uncomfortable and talked about it during the conference. This blew up the internet atheist/skeptic community around 2011 or so, led to a big split. “Elevatorgate”

dumpsterlid ,

/r/atheism often got cyberbullied for being a bunch of insufferable jerks.

I don’t believe in god but you would never find me any closer to hanging out in /r/atheism than any other actually religious subreddit.

I mean, I guess I don’t want to judge that much because of how a subreddit like that can be a place for people living in extremely oppressive/conservative christian communities to express their anger at being in such a suffocating environment, but it often seemed like the criticisms of religion from the sub were more of the “but akshually this part of believing in god is dumb” instead of more along the lines of “who cares if god exists, y’all are incredibly hateful”.

andros_rex ,

The best thing about those ads is that they’re mostly “AI” generated. You know none of the people making those ads would actually wash the feet of a queer person.

TurtleJoe ,
@TurtleJoe@lemmy.world avatar

He Gets Us’ Ad Sponsors Don’t Believe in the Jesus They’re Sellin

llama ,
@llama@midwest.social avatar

So now they're just charging people for what they were already doing anyway.

PoliticalAgitator ,

Yep. Reddit puts very little effort into preventing vote manipulation and astroturfing because it all looks like user engagement but they almost certainly know how common it is.

This is just them monetizing the astroturfing as they try and wring every cent from people ahead of their IPO.

Sizzler ,

You're just splurging lies at this point, reddit has always put plenty of effort towards vote manipulation. I dislike reddit but stop making stuff up just for votes.

Morefan ,

You're both right.
They are FINE with manipulation if it's something they want to promote.
But if it's not allowed in their dogma then it's banned.

Sizzler ,

I'll agree with that.

PoliticalAgitator ,

People are welcome to try for themselves, which is how I originally learned they do fuck all. They didn't even clear the lowest bar of "20 upvotes from 20 accounts, on the same IP with no other activity, just switching with RES".

Maybe that's changed in the decade since, but the search results for "buy reddit upvotes" don't bode well.

Sizzler ,

It has changed since, in fact for me the watershed moment of change came when RES stopped being able to calculate upvotes/dv's because there was no longer clear feedback that your vote counted.

PoliticalAgitator ,

Does that mean they fixed the problem or did they simply make it impossible for people outside of reddit to see the extent of it?

Sizzler ,

At that moment they made clear upvoting hazy for people outside of reddit, I doubt it fixed it there but I have seen their anti-vote manipulation system in action since then that does impact "lazy" coders

MyFairJulia ,
@MyFairJulia@lemmy.world avatar

Oh, would you look at the time! It's the year of the fediverse!

elucubra ,

On a Linux desktop, obviously.

AdolfSchmitler ,

"28% more clicks"
Yeah cuz ppl thought they were actual posts not ads lol

kenopsik ,

Yep, advertiser don't care how they got those clicks. They just want the numbers to go up so they feel like their "investment" is doing something. Tricking people into thinking it's user content, showing half naked girls for a dumb mobile gambling game, showing fake products... they don't care. Advertisers only have one thought: "Hurr Durr Numbers Go Brr"

rottingleaf ,

Reddit's new paid ads look exactly like user posts

So what's new?

Blackmist ,

I'll tell you what's new, pal. The McRib Megaburger, at McDonalds. It's nutritious and delicious at just $7.99 or $9.99 with fries and a drink of your choice as long as you don't want a milkshake or anything with actual sugar in it.

droans ,

Wow. Everyone, ignore this guy, he's also an ad.

Instead, you should hop on over to your local Chevy Dealership and ask about test driving the all new 2025 Tahoe. Drive one home today for less than $2,000 down!

kromem ,

One of the smarter ad analysts I knew likened ad spaces to ecosystems, where a bunch of companies come in with crap ads that aren't related to what people are actually in market for or are misleading, and act as polluters which turn people off from green pastures.

As an example, when mobile browsing was first getting off the ground CTR for mobile banner ads was 15%.

Reddit's metrics are about to go to shit.

CitizenKong ,

15 percent for banner ads is actually pretty good.

laughterlaughter ,

Yeah. That's why OP mentioned it.

But his point is that that number has gone down to shit because later the banner ads became shit.

T156 ,

If the ads weren't terrible, people would not have invented and popularised the ad-blocker.

laughterlaughter ,

We're not disagreeing here.

waterSticksToMyBalls ,

My first subreddit to get banned was one dedicated to pointing out obvious ad campaigns.

Agent641 ,

"How do you do, fellow redditors? Pray tell, of all the Dodge Ram variants, which one is your favorite, and what make it your choice as a discerning American patriot?"

humbletightband ,

And I bet it was banned before the infamous subreddit about underaged girls or even before bans of incel network

londos ,

I was curious about the "Philly cream cheese" campaign example they mentioned. I assume it's this post.

The top reply is trolling them, which is awesome. So much for increased engagement.

But even funnier is the next top reply, which seems sincere. But when you look at the user profile, almost all of u/sunshinedogger's comments in the last year are on sponsored posts. So even the positive engagement is manufactured?

Sterile_Technique ,
@Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world avatar

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

AnarchistArtificer ,

I honestly find it impressive how Reddit continues to find new ways to enshittify the platform

jivandabeast ,

I honestly find it impressive how quickly the word "enshittification" is brought up in Lemmy comments

(/s, but we do talk about it a lot here)

Cold_Brew_Enema ,

You mean like Linux?

I use Ubuntu, btw

NateNate60 ,

If it's not already the law, it needs to be. It should be required that paid advertising be disclosed in all contexts.

halcyoncmdr ,
@halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world avatar

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.

NateNate60 ,

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.

jol ,

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.

Damage ,

In my country TV ads are explicitly marked with text in one corner

Gestrid ,

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.

Pra ,

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.

Gonkulator ,
@Gonkulator@lemm.ee avatar

At this point if you removed all lies in the united states all youd have left is a chimp in a business suit with a flag lapel pin.

Alexstarfire ,

That's not a nice thing to say about Trump.

gardylou ,
@gardylou@lemmy.world avatar

That comparison isn't nice to the chimp!

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