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Reddit's new paid ads look exactly like user posts

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.

Mereo ,
@Mereo@lemmy.ca avatar

"Just like the megathread," an announcement reads, "free-form ads encourage multiple users to come together, get the information they need, and deep dive into the topic at hand."
Reddit explained that the open-ended nature of these ads will give advertisers more freedom to explore creativity and, hopefully, to start conversations with users.

Enshittification to the extreme....

MisterMoo ,

Hahaha, what’s your problem, come on, let’s just dive into the topic of how delicious Snickers™ bars are and what a great value they are too!

Kbobabob ,

I hear Snickers is making smaller candies at the normal price.

samus12345 ,
@samus12345@lemmy.world avatar

But still packed with peanuts! Snickers™ really satisfies!

TexasDrunk ,

Hey, you seem like you're having a hard time. You're not you when you're hungry. Have a Snickers.

kjaeselrek ,

I’m just here to talk about rampart

samus12345 ,
@samus12345@lemmy.world avatar

to start conversations with users.

Sounds like great fun for trolls.

jaybone ,

Years ago you used to be able to comment in ad threads. And most people were just calling the ad out on its bullshit. So they stopped allowing comment replies in those threads.

This will somehow be different?

merc ,

Yeah, I remember those fun times. See an ad post, look up their scandals on Wikipedia, post about those scandals in the comments...

There's no way this will work unless they lock down those posts. If they want something that looks like organic engagement with comments that don't ruin the brand, it can't work anything like the rest of Reddit. They'll have to have corporate moderators who remove any post that is even slightly challenging to the brand, because otherwise those will be the ones getting upvotes.

BeatTakeshi ,
@BeatTakeshi@lemmy.world avatar

I like how they try to sell the idea that tricking users is in fact a nice and innovative way to advertise

DaddleDew ,

And that the "increased community engagement" isn't mainly comments of people complaining about being tricked into clicking on an ad.

Dkarma ,

Apparently click fraud is fine on reddit 🤷‍♂️

gregorum ,
@gregorum@lemm.ee avatar

“It’s monetizable!”

EddieTee77 ,

Whatever it takes before their IPO. It's disgusting

jaybone ,

Have they still not done their IPO yet??

Shit or get off the pot.

Gestrid ,

They're in the middle of trying to get their users to create accounts with E-Trade, their Directed Share Program (DSP) administrator. They'll start selling shares to their users as part of their DSP late next week. After that is the IPO.

JohnEdwa ,
@JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz avatar

The moderation effort required to clean up these ads must be massive.

BeatTakeshi ,
@BeatTakeshi@lemmy.world avatar

I am sure that in the first iteration they did not remove the "Report" function, but those suckers learn fast

ilinamorato ,

"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.

WhatsHerBucket ,
@WhatsHerBucket@lemmy.world avatar

Who didn’t see that coming?

Obligatory fuck spez

RagnarokOnline ,

Fuck spez

WhiteHotaru ,

Fuck spez!

LunchEnjoyer ,

Fuck spez!!

callmepk ,
@callmepk@lemmy.world avatar

Fuck spez!!!

letsgo ,

Fuck spez!! !!

merc ,

Fuck using his Reddit username and letting him hide behind it.

Lucidlethargy ,
@Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works avatar

Fuck Spez, AKA Steve Huffman.

CosmoNova ,

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?

kaitco ,

I used to downvote them. Now I just nothing them.

Tippon ,

Report them as malicious content 👍

jaybone ,

I assume the downvote doesn’t really count. It just looks to you as if it did.

merc ,

I used to post nasty things when they allowed that. Then I used to downvote them. Then the ad blocker I used blocked them so I never saw them. Then I stopped posting on Reddit.

HAL_9_TRILLION ,

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.

NateNate60 ,

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

halcyoncmdr ,
@halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world avatar

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 ,

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.

jol ,

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.

Damage ,

In my country TV ads are explicitly marked with text in one corner

topinambour_rex ,
@topinambour_rex@lemmy.world avatar

In my country, paper press as to identify when something looks like an article, but it's an ad.

Gestrid ,

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.

anonymouse ,

I stopped watching local news when they started having the anchors pitch to ads like they were just another news item.

baru ,

That's already the case in at least the Netherlands.

Pra ,

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.

samus12345 , (edited )
@samus12345@lemmy.world avatar

Like so:

https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/EOCzjSDTPBvgdkAo0lPBkg--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTY0MDtoPTEzODY-/https://media.zenfs.com/en/techcrunch_350/aa5ff9510bf1b80f634fe31a06d71ef6

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.

Gonkulator ,
@Gonkulator@lemm.ee avatar

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    Alexstarfire ,

    That's not a nice thing to say about Trump.

    Shimitar ,
    @Shimitar@feddit.it avatar

    Its a law where I live...

    PoliticallyIncorrect ,
    @PoliticallyIncorrect@lemmy.world avatar

    Fuck Spez!!

    frustrated_phagocytosis ,

    I hope a side effect of the AI training on reddit comments is that text output is littered with Fuck Spez

    PoliticallyIncorrect ,
    @PoliticallyIncorrect@lemmy.world avatar

    It would be amazing 👍👍

    Boozilla ,
    @Boozilla@lemmy.world avatar

    Palpatine voice: Good. Goooood. Let the stupid flow through you.

    qwertyqwertyqwerty ,

    15 years on Reddit before leaving. It was the only social media platform where I actually felt leadership personally hated its users.

    willington ,

    Don't forget digg.com.

    Darkassassin07 ,
    @Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca avatar

    That's weird; I've never seen any of those....

    Oh yeah, that's because I haven't visited reddit in ~9 months.

    Wappen ,

    That's illegal in Germany though, right? AFAIK all ads must be disclosed as such.

    gregorum ,
    @gregorum@lemm.ee avatar

    They’re tagged as “promoted”

    Ephera ,

    Having seen previous lawsuits in this area, I doubt that's good enough. Like, it's still clearly designed to be deceptive.

    gregorum ,
    @gregorum@lemm.ee avatar

    Oh, certainly. And I’m sure that the tag is designed to be difficult to differentiate from other tags and to go unnoticed.

    seSvxR3ull7LHaEZFIjM ,

    Early results suggest the effort is working. 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.

    Yeah, because users get tricked into clicking and then immediately leave.

    gregorum ,
    @gregorum@lemm.ee avatar

    But not before commenting, “fuck spez!”

    TexasDrunk ,

    Which counts as engagement.

    merc ,

    And doesn't bother Steve Huffman because you're using his Reddit username, and by doing that you're talking about Reddit, effectively promoting it. Stop using "spez" and start making it so Steve Huffman has trouble giving his real name to a real hotel, restaurant, etc. because they say "oh, that asshole?".

    FartsWithAnAccent ,

    Sounds terrible, glad I'm on Lemmy!

    ColeSloth ,

    They had tons of covert "ads" before this, too. Set up like 100 fake accounts (commonly bought from people who create and fluff them up by posting and commenting for a while so they look legit) and then post your add and use like 20 or so of your Bot accounts to upvote and comment to get the ball rolling.

    Then you have your add there, got it climbing a bit in "new" and didn't pay a dime for it.

    SomeGuy69 ,

    Not surprised, after they declared hunting season open, in one of the latest business blogs.

    DaddleDew ,

    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.

    Krudler ,

    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.

    sailingbythelee ,

    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.

    jaybone ,

    That’s a lot like Lemmy though.

    Krudler ,

    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.

    vext01 ,
    @vext01@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

    Congrats on your freedom

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