There’s been a few people who commented this in the past, but as an advertiser on Reddit, I want to share the numbers I see.
First, there’s a few things to understand in the world of advertising:
- Cost Per Impression - Usually shown as a cost per 1000 impressions, this is how much it costs to run a regular ad
- Cost Per Click - This is a different type of ad where you only pay for who clicks. It’s also the reason sometimes you see really bad ads - They’re only paying per click, so they want the most gullible customers
- Analytics - I can watch who comes to my website and what they do. I can actually watch a lot more info than that, but it’s all I need to run my businesses
- Organic User - Someone who came to my website without an ad
PSA: If you’re not using uBlock Origin to block ads, please install it. Firefox - Chrome. Every other mainstream adblocker sells your data in some capacity, but uBlock Origin is open source.
Now, with those things in mind, I pay for Cost Per Click, and I target a more expensive user group. In the ad I’m about to show you (picked at random, but it’s within ±20% of most my ads), it costs me an average of $0.82 every time someone clicks my ad:
(Yes, it’s brutally expensive. If you really hate ads, install AdNauseam. You will cost advertising companies thousands of dollars.)
But okay that’s fine, because roughly 2,000 people went to my site, right? Lets see what they did when they went there
See - There’s something interesting about this, and it’s less apparent in other advertising networks. You see while Reddit charged me 1,600$ for 2,000 users, my own analytics show only 1,142 people came to my site in the same time window - and that number also includes my organic users, by the way.
So what happened to almost 50% of the users I paid for? Some people accuse Reddit of inflating the numbers, but that’s illegal, and there’s a much simpler explanation. Reddit’s PMs and are deliberately designing ad placement to maximize clicks (and get more money). What they don’t realize, is they’ve made everyone miss-click on ads, so both users and advertisers miss out.
In fact, that miss-clicking part is trivial to prove. Guess when I ran advertising campaigns on Reddit?
Anyways, that’s all for now. Reddit doesn’t only screw over their users, but their advertisers as well.
This reinforces my belief that online advertising produces a lot of objective data (“how many times was my ad viewed? clicked?”) but benefits from not being able to tie that to outcomes companies are actually interested in (“are the ads expanding business?”).
A number of years ago I read an analysis on how some large social media site had changed the order of a few important buttons out of the blue. This was likely from A/B testing showing increased engagement, but it was probably just confused users clicking on it. I bet similar things happen all the time in ads, possibly inadvertently. If an A/B change shows increased ad clicks, it’s unlikely not to be adopted, even if it’s not intentional clicks.
A lot of fast paced companies, big on “ownership” and data give promotions based on how well your feature performed. You need a measurable metric, so they usually go for something like clicks.
They absolutely know it’s making the product worse. But for a 100k/yr bonus, they don’t care.
Bottom line: stop advertising and do us all a favor
Reddit’s PMs and are deliberately designing ad placement to maximize clicks (and get more money). What they don’t realize, is they’ve made everyone miss-click on ads, so both users and advertisers miss out.
What does this mean? Are ads being sent in Private Messages on Reddit?
I think he means product managers? The people in charge of design changes and ad placement.
I think he means performance marketing https://www.shopify.com/blog/performance-marketing. The ad placement is more to the point. If you put up a pop up where it’s hard to find the x or right next to the next button where it’s hard not to click.
This makes sense!
Project Manager
Thank you.
*Product Manager. They meet with customers, analyze the competitive landscape, set the feature development roadmap, and define requirements for engineering teams. The “I’m a people person!” guy in Office Space.
I assume they ment project managers
And how is this not fraud?
It probably is, but the ones that they are targeting aren’t losing enough to make pursuing it worthwhile.
Arguably it’s gross incompetence, as in they have a serious lack of knowledge about ad engagement
Reddit routinely feigns incompetence when the reality is just that they’re bad people.
They pretend their staff don’t see the extremism on their platform, but every time there’s a mass shooting they’ll be handing over the shooters predictable post history.
They pretend it’s impossible to stop someone from making a new account after they’re banned for sending graphic rape threats to TwoXC posters, but they dont make even a token effort.
Behind the incompetence there’s always a situation where it’s more profitable to just be evil.
So users are mis-clicking on an ad and immediately closing their browser so it registers as a “click” on Reddit but not google analytics?
It’s not registering as a click anywhere but Reddit, because half the users are clicking Back before their browser loads, and a quarter are clicking Back within a second of the page appearing.
This happens in all advertising networks, but not to the rate of Reddit
Yeah, back before I used uBlock, when I would missclick and see it’s loading an alb.reddit.com url, I would immediately hit the back button before it has time to redirect me to the ad.
That should show under bounce rate though, right? I can’t imagine a user being able to click ‘back’ before an http request gets sent to the analytics server
As someone who uses Reddit on devices that don’t always have ublock, this is exactly what happens.
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I suspect those are OPs urls, and showing them could allow someone to identify the company or site they work for.
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Probably how many people clicked on what url. There are probably some information about those, the more trivial would be from where in the world they are and how they got there (following a link, being redirected or having entered it manually)
More complicated stats would include estimated age, gender etc, if available
I’d be happy to walk you through how this works. It’s way less than you think
But if you just want to see for yourself, visit a site with Omnibug as a browser extension (F12 to bring up the panel)
You can see every bit of data going to Google analytics from your machine. You could be the only person ever to visit my site and I would not be able to figure out anything about you
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Agree 100%. I’m a media director in a mid-size agency and saw similar results in a test campaign we did. Bounce rate was 97.1% on traffic coming from Reddit. It’s so high I wouldn’t put it past them if it was just bot traffic.
Why are you suggesting everyone to use ad blockers and tools that would fuck with advertisers, when you yourself are an advertiser?
Because fuck em
Absolute chadness. Salute. o7
Lol, ok understandable
I salute you, sir!
That’s stage 3 enshitification for you.
Woah, what? There are stages??? Do tell!
Wow. What a fantastic read
Be sure to read the other blog post linked in that blog, too:
https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start
It’s a rant from a veteran social media/blog writer from some of the earliest days of the internet.
It’s a bit repetitive, occasionally overwrought, and very long, so feel free to skip some paragraphs, but if you’ve been around the net for a while, especially if you were here before Facebook, you’ll recognize exactly what they’re describing and know that anger.
That feels like 25 years of shit I’ve never been able to find the words to say.
I was looking for that article a couple of weeks ago, and for the life of me could not remember where I’d originally seen it. I didn’t even notice it was there when digging this up. Amazing!
Going to bookmark that this time.
Damn
Stop benefitting from the internet, it’s not for you to enjoy, it’s for us to use to extract money from you. Stop finding beauty and connection in the world, loneliness is more profitable and easier to control.
Stop being human. A mindless bot who makes regular purchases is all that’s really needed.
Thanks for sharing, I see what you mean about it feeling like something you have wanted to say.
A section I liked is
And I also understand that we are the generation who has to go through this part of it. We’re the ones born in time to be forced to make the rules and defend them. To say hey maybe one guy shouldn’t be able to own the village square. Because it was never remotely possible before. It’s all new and we have to figure it out. To agitate and legislate and be constantly vigilant. Maybe it’ll all seem so obvious and settled in 50 years, but those are our 50 years and no one else is going to have to be the first to have these conversations and try to make policy out of them. That’s us, it’s our lot, and it sucks ass, but this technology is the singularity we geeks have been talking about, and it turns out it’s not just impossible to imagine life on the other side of it before it happens, but it’s really fucking hard to figure out life on the other side of it once you get there, too.
Lately I’ve been feeling a sense of dull but oddly optimistic sense of resignation about the fate of internet and privacy and all the AI bullshit, and I think this paragraph captures that feeling.
(Yes, it’s brutally expensive. If you really hate ads, install AdNauseam. You will cost advertising companies thousands of dollars.)
Thank you for pointing this out.
But then you give more money to Reddit.
In the short term
I can solve this by - wait for it - not going to reddit.
Temporarily. Only until advertisers do what this guy has done and realize, “Oh hey, the ads aren’t effective at all” and change their advertising tactics
I clicked at least a few ads a week average on Reddit. All entirely on accident, closed them immediately. So, your numbers make perfect sense to me. Funny to think reddit charged someone near a dollar for that millisecond before I closed it…
Interesting, I didn’t know the prices vary by user group.
Which groups are the most expensive?
I think Reddit specific design app so that people misclick more often.
Could you show this to them and just say that you want your money back?
That almost never happens. The best way is to stop advertising and call out their team when they beg you to reconsider
It’s worth it to get their reports though. Some of my happiest moments at work is to see the complete dogshit reports agencies and ad companies put out.
If you’re ever feeling like a loser think you’re bad at your job, suffer from imposter syndrome, one of Facebook’s, reddit’s, or any other big company’s ad reports will brighten up your life with how bad it is
Interesting read, thanks 👍🏼
