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.
I like how they try to sell the idea that tricking users is in fact a nice and innovative way to advertise
And that the “increased community engagement” isn’t mainly comments of people complaining about being tricked into clicking on an ad.
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“we could just lie to people” is an advertising tactic somebody always comes up with. It’s a Rubicon that absolutely shreds customer goodwill, though.
Assuming, of course, it isn’t already shredded.
If it’s not already the law, it needs to be. It should be required that paid advertising be disclosed in all contexts.
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.
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.
That’s already the case in at least the Netherlands.
My first subreddit to get banned was one dedicated to pointing out obvious ad campaigns.
“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?”
And I bet it was banned before the infamous subreddit about underaged girls or even before bans of incel network
If was that post jail bait but pre incel ban wave if I recall correctly. They said it was targeted harassment/brigandine bc all the posts specifically named the accounts pushing each campaign.
Who didn’t see that coming?
Obligatory fuck spez
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?
Dang good catch on the second user, I wouldn’t have noticed since I usually don’t look at people’s profiles.
It’s kind of funny that reddit will become this chamber of advertisers making posts and fake users “engaging” while the real people all migrate to lemmy.
I’m also curious if the fake users are part of the campaign or if reddit is scamming the advertisers too.
Why not both?
Absolutely, you cannot trust reddit content anymore. If anybody wants to still visit the site, I recommend you buy and AdBlock Gold subscription, which you can get at half the price now. Link and discount code in my profile
Did you really think all those positive comments were genuine? I almost puked reading the first few.
I live in the Midwest, and I’ve actually seen a few of those on plates at potlucks. It is indeed disgusting.
Of course it’s manufactured! And I’ll bet you a blowjob from my cousin Chester that it’s all AI-generated.
“28% more clicks” Yeah cuz ppl thought they were actual posts not ads lol
Oh, would you look at the time! It’s the year of the fediverse!
You plant shit seeds, you get shit weeds.
If it’s one thing I learned from the last BS they pulled during the protests last year, it’s that their actions will have little impact on reddit user behavior. People will complain and express outrage, but the vast majority of users will just sit back and take it like good little AI trainers.
I for one will not be one of them. When they removed mods from communities that were in protest, that’s enough for me to stay clear going forward. As much as I miss the content, it warms my soul every time I think about the ad revenue they’re missing out on by my own personal decisions to not consume it.
Honestly your mental health has almost certainly improved since leaving that place.
Their algorithms are designed to pump engagement and outrage. They want you either scared or angry and it sucks.
Lemmy has less content, but is also less addictive and less toxic. Yes it’s still social media, it still has shit bags but the numbers are far better.
Lemmy has less content, but is also less addictive and less toxic. Yes it’s still social media, it still has shit bags but the numbers are far better.
Although part of that could also just be due to the size of the place. Lemmy’s still absolutely tiny compared to Reddit, and like a lot of social media’s early days, it’ll likely only get worse as more people move in.
Early Reddit would have been pretty cosy and non-toxic, that would only come in later.
Entirely agreed, though I wish there were more of a joint effort between Lemmy and Kbin communities to find novel ways of getting more redditors to switch over to the Fediverse. Wishful thinking perhaps, though it’d be nice to have more active communities around here.
The biggest problem with lemmy is that we don’t have a good way to search for info.
Usually I do shit like “reddit monitor recommandation”, and I’ll get some thread where I can read opinions.
We can’t do they with lemmy 😐
A while back somebody posted info on how to make a custom DDG search that would search the most common Lemmy instances with one keyword. If you’re interested I can go digging for it.
I never went back to /r/programming after they forced it open with new mods.
I checked reddit every now and then after that, until I read a piece of tragic news that really shocked me and left me sad for days. Then I realized that reddit just stopped being a fun place - the whole point I started visiting it in the first place. Never went back, never looked back.
Clicking an image on Twitter and it actually being an external link was the last thing I ever did on that platform.
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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.
15 percent for banner ads is actually pretty good.
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.
If the ads weren’t terrible, people would not have invented and popularised the ad-blocker.
We’re not disagreeing here.
So they seriously not remember what thousands of people left Digg and moved to their platform for???
Reddit had a fraction of the users Digg had at one point. Then Digg changed to a new UI no one liked and started putting adds that looked like posts into the main feed.
Not sure the FTC is going to be a big fan of this…
I remember it already being a thing 5 years ago with upvote/downvote buttons, karma and everything. I guess they just removed the abyssmally small grey text that said something like ‘paid ad’ in a corner?
I used to downvote them. Now I just nothing them.
I assume the downvote doesn’t really count. It just looks to you as if it did.
Report them as malicious content 👍
This was a thing like 10 years ago too, iirc. Ads had threads and you could post in them and up/down vote them. That… didn’t go well. For advertisers, that is.
Just deleted my Reddit account. I haven’t used it in over a year now anyway. I was waiting for something like this to make a statement.
It’s been like one of those long running soap operas.
For at least the last 5 years “today’s” front page is nearly indistinguishable from “yesterday’s”.
You can disappear for 6 months and come back and it’s exactly the same. You’ve missed nothing.
Orange man bad, fascism bad, phobia bad, sexism bad, racism bad, bosses suck, inflation sucks, boomers suck, ooh a celebrity! Celebrity dead so sad.
That’s most of the internet now. I mean, yay, we’re calling bad stuff bad. I do it, too, and I’m also addicted to orange man news like all you other rubber-neckers, but yawn it’s all getting a bit repetitious and homogenized. Unfortunately, as we get bored, the more these nutty politicians do crazy shit for the media to report on, all to keep our attention. It feels like a death spiral.
That’s a lot like Lemmy though.
That can’t even be denied at this point. There was a small window before the Reddit API fiasco and everybody showed up here to post the same rat-shit they gobble over there. I had a mini-freakout over a “If your username was a username, what would username username username username?” type question in AskLemmy or something. The moronitude feels inescapable.
