The blackout is starting to have a financial impact on Reddit, but we must stay dark!

Jessica@lemmy.world to Lemmy.World Announcements@lemmy.world – 1068 points –
Ripples Through Reddit as Advertisers Weather Moderators Strike
adweek.com

If the performance weakness continues for a week or two, the agency would start recommending decreasing spend with Reddit or directing it to other platforms.

After the blackout, we will be closely monitoring user behavior on Reddit and guide clients when we can unpause,” said Freddy Dabaghi, managing director at Stagwell-backed Crispin Porter Bogusky, which has asked clients to stop campaigns, depending on their client goals.

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If I were world dictator I would just make advertising illegal. It's the perfect dictator move. Simple policy that's hard to enforce which will almost certainly have unintended consequences. But God damn do I hate advertising.

Your wish has been granted, all small businesses have gone bankrupt because nobody knows they exist and since the only form of advertising left is undercover guerilla advertising campaigns every post on every platform is secretly an advertisement!

I think people should be allowed to promote products and services, but those promotions should not be given any more weight than any other kind of post. The problem is when advertisers are allowed to buy spots on a site.

Wouldn't that just turn into who can afford the most vote manipulation on their reddit posts?

It is such a bizarre and creepy industry, everything about it is gross. I support you for world dictator!

The problem is that it is basically impossible to clearly differentiate from reviews which are a good and necessary thing. Pay someone to review your product and what now?

don't complain if all the free service become paid...

I honestly think I'd prefer that they just let me pay them outright rather than trying to use me as bait for advertisers. The expectation that everything should be free leads to what we see today

meh, good point but i'd prefer some reasonably placed ad (not like those website that have 99% ad and 1% content) instead of paying for something that maybe i'll never use again

Yea I wouldn't mind If some of these instances had like one stickied post at the top for a paid ad If that was enough to pay for most of these server costs

You ever though about where the money from advertisers comes from? I would pay for Google if I would then pay less for products that waste money on "marketing" by paying millions to Google.

The thing is that there aren't significant direct production costs per user for technology services like there are for material items, just overall maintenance costs that only scale noticeably with a large increase of new users, so it would actually be possible to pay for infrastructure and salary costs and all of that with just a percentage of your overall userbase being subscribed and subsidizing the rest. This is actually a monetization strategy that's working out for some privacy focused services like ProtonMail. So it would be necessary to convince some users to sign up but not necessarily all of them.

sadly adverts are what allows some things to be free to consumers, it's the funding that supports the content that people consume. It's what it is for now, in the future maybe there would be better merit systems funded by tax or something if humans get together and stop being greedy.