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.
Recently went on Reddit and laughed hysterically at the amount of religious propaganda I saw in this format. Example:
-religious propaganda -gambling bullshit (including crypto/crypto adjacent bullshit) -military brainwashing/propaganda -alcohol ads
Just the worst fucking garbage bullshit.
r/Atheism held the line for decades, and y’all cyberbullied them for it.
/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”.
IMHO, it was an elevator ride that killed r/atheism…
OOTL. Can you explain further?
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”
I always thought it was the “faces of atheism” thread.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MuseumOfReddit/comments/38i8se/the_faces_of_atheism/?rdt=63339
That was a killing blow + “the professional quote maker.”
But it was a good place for some decent discussion back in the day. I learned enough biology from arguing with creationists there + youtube to test out of college biology….
-military brainwashing
Yvan eht nioj
Ok if your ad uses TL;DR or any other internet speak, you deserve to go bankrupt. I’m so fucking sick of corporations trying to cash in on meme culture and trends and ruining it every single time.
Recuperation has been around for a lot longer than the Internet.
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.
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.
Apparently click fraud is fine on reddit 🤷♂️
“It’s monetizable!”
Whatever it takes before their IPO. It’s disgusting
Have they still not done their IPO yet??
Shit or get off the pot.
The moderation effort required to clean up these ads must be massive.
I am sure that in the first iteration they did not remove the “Report” function, but those suckers learn fast
“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.
Welcome to 5 years ago? This has been around for years…
This is what killed Digg in 2010.
OP lives under a rock
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.
I literally would look for reddit posts about suggestions for various things specifically because they weren’t ads.
Thanks spez for fucking killing one of the few resources I had that wasn’t just paid bullshit lying about what products are worth a shit…
Let’s be honest here. Reddit had been astroturfed for over a decade, and a majority of posts that spoke favourably of products were ads.
The only value Reddit had in that regard is through Google surfacing the valuable discussions and content (e.g. the ones that weren’t the ads).
Reddit from the beginning had bot accounts to artificially inflate its number of users.
That was before learned helplessness became a staple of the internet experience, i think a lot fewer reddit users will be motivated to leave compared to the people who left digg for reddit.
Happy to be proven wrong, though.
How is this news? Reddit has been doing this for literally years.
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.
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.
In my country TV ads are explicitly marked with text in one corner
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.
deleted by creator
That’s not a nice thing to say about Trump.
deleted by creator
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.
Like so:
Annoying and all that, but something pretty common in most social media sites I see nowadays. I quickly learn to filter anything with that label out as junk.
That’s already the case in at least the Netherlands.
Ads are not the only reason, but if you’re still on reddit, you clearly missed the point why reddit became popular.
If I hadn’t already left, this would probably have been the thing that did it for me.
So now they’re just charging people for what they were already doing anyway.
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.
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.
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.
I’ll agree with that.
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.
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.
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?
“28% more clicks” Yeah cuz ppl thought they were actual posts not ads lol
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”
You made me look up Bill Hicks’ marketing bit
I miss him
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Do you know what’s also getting more clicks than last year at this time and the year before? Lemmy!
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
My first subreddit to get banned was one dedicated to pointing out obvious ad campaigns.
And I bet it was banned before the infamous subreddit about underaged girls or even before bans of incel network
“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?”
Oh, would you look at the time! It’s the year of the fediverse!
On a Linux desktop, obviously.
Reddit’s new paid ads look exactly like user posts
So what’s new?
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.
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!
Whenever I’m stressed out about too many ads, I take Fark-It-All. Ask your doctor if Fark-It-All is right for YOU.
This.
I tried Fark-It-All and it legit helped me reduce my stress level a lot. After Amazon drove up its Ads I felt I realy couldn’t take it any more. And since there is literally nothing you can do about ads, neither on reddit nor on Amazon, I looked for other options. And what can I say? Taking some Fark-It-All brings the fun back into funding, hypercapitalist corpations trough engaging with Ads. I highly recommend Fark-It-All, even if you just feel like you could potentialy be stressed out a bit by Ads. I’ve heard a lot of realy positive feedback on taking it preventative.
No /s, it realy is the shit. Just try it out and see for yourself.
It happens here, too. Like this shill post about the Scrub Daddy, where the comments are highly suspicious.
Why has that sponge been shilled so heavily? I see it being marketed on TikTok of all places…
Because they have a creative marketing department who knows the cheapest ways to market things are to make it look like it isn’t marketing.
It even happens in RL conversations, say, with people who bought stock of a big company subtly (or they think it looks so) recommending it.
Right? Been that way for quite a while. One of the main reasons I refused to use the app.
The reddit mobile browser is literally broken and keeps getting worse. They are updating it a lot, but I swear to god it gets worse and increasingly broken with each iteration. I actually liked the browser when they initially killed 3rd party apps, but shortly after that it got a huge redesign that was infinitely worse than before. I am thoroughly convinced they want that experience to be miserable so I go download and use their ad-infested shitty app instead. Fuck reddit.
I am confident that’s the case - there’s a reason the mobile website is constantly asking you if you’d like to use the app instead… it’s their preferred mode for you to view. Even if it is terrible, it locks you onto Reddit.
They can access a lot more information about you with a native app, and it also gives them the ability to do push notifications which makes things more sticky
