The next attention-grabbing post you see in your Reddit feed might just be a paid 'free-form ad'.

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.

  • NateNate60@lemmy.worldEnglish
    135·
    8 months ago

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

    • halcyoncmdr@lemmy.worldEnglish
      55·
      8 months ago

      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@lemmy.worldEnglish
        17·
        8 months ago

        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.