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.
(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.
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
In the short term
I can solve this by - wait for it - not going to reddit.
Interesting, I didn’t know the prices vary by user group.
Which groups are the most expensive?
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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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But honestly don’t a LOT of companies intentionally place ads to maximize misclicks? I’m not saying that’s ok and as a consumer just flipping annoying but it’s definitely not specific to reddit.
On RIF it was easy to tell what was an ad and avoid it if I wanted. One of the many reasons I am not using the official app (and therefore the site) is because they make ads look just like normal posts. It does say promoted but you have to actually be looking for that or you won’t notice it.
Interesting read, thanks 👍🏼
Do you still advertise there? If so, why?
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
I salute you, sir!
Lol, ok understandable
Absolute chadness. Salute. o7
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
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…
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.
This is not unique to Reddit, either.
I started diving into YouTube advertising a few months ago, just as a tool for promoting a video of mine that I felt should have gotten more attention than the sub-thousand views it was stuck with. For the record, I don’t try to force advertising on people that don’t want it, and I was glad to achieve my 2k subscriber count to qualify for AdSense, just so that I can turn ads OFF on my videos. I have a stable full-time job and I feel like it’s better to make my videos ad-free then to get whatever small amount of money YouTube is going to pay me for my hobby. If you want to use uBlock Origin to block YouTube ads, including my own, that’s fine by me.
Anyway, my experience with Google Ads has been enlightening. First off, just to get clicks of any good quality is already expensive. I tried to be as inclusive as I could, but I have been fighting Average View Duration all the time. I want people clicking on the video that really want to see the video, not people who are confused about why they are there, whether it’s in the wrong language, wrong set of search keywords, not the right device type for long-form videos, etc. So, I end up filtering down countries to ones with at least some amount of English-speakers, and aggressively trimming down keywords to just ones that are specific enough for the video content. Even then, I wished the Average View Duration was as high as some of my more organically-grown videos.
What’s worse, and this is the point that is relevant to the OP, is that I can’t match up Google Ads’ click rate with my channel’s video analytics, even though they are the same parent company! I can sort views by country in Google Ads, and it does not show the same set on the Geography tab in YouTube’s video analytics, despite a view meaning the same thing in both platforms. For a time, it was consistently 30-50% less on video analytics, which is frustrating, because it makes it hard to figure out which countries have good AVD for the video and I wasn’t sure if Google was just ripping me off on advertising costs.
Funny, I check it today and the problem is much less pronounced. I honestly think that recent advertising study lit a fire under Google to get them to fix problems like these. I wasn’t using TrueView ads, but this might have been a side effect of that.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
